Pedrami Gallery is pleased to present Past Presence Sense, a solo exhibition of works by Diane Marie Uwase.
Past Presence Sense marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring paintings that navigate the intersections of identity, memory, and obsession. These themes unfold within dreamlike stages: figures framed by curtains, mirrored against vast skies, or interrupted by the grip of red gloves. The works reveal how memory lingers like a backdrop, how identity is fractured and reframed through mirrors, and how obsession surfaces in repeated gestures and symbolic props. Clouds drift across painted skies, bodies confront their reflections, and gazes hover in spaces that feel both intimate and estranged.
The exhibition’s title highlights this paradox. The “past” is never gone, “presence” is already haunted, and “sense” hovers between perception and intuition. Memories are the sense of a past presence — reminders of what remains even in absence. These works lean into such contradictions, suspending the viewer in states that resist resolution: at once revealing and withholding, staged and vulnerable, earthly and surreal.
Several paintings underscore this ambivalence. In one, a figure is framed by blue drapery that recalls a proscenium stage, her presence simultaneously unveiled and concealed — a performance of identity in flux. Elsewhere, a hand clad in crimson gloves interrupts the scene, both commanding and protective, a gesture that borders on obsession. Mirrors recur throughout the exhibition, offering the promise of self-knowledge but reflecting instead a fractured, elusive self.
The people in Past Presence Sense are not passive subjects but active agents negotiating visibility. Their gestures — an offered hand, a turned face, a gaze cast beyond the canvas — complicate the viewer’s role as witness. Each image becomes a site where identity collides with memory, where obsession presses into form, and where presence is never whole but always insistently felt.
Exhibition Dates:
4th September – 5th October 2025
Opening Night: Thursday, 4th September 19:00 – 22:00
Finissage: Sunday, 5th October 14:00 – 17:00