Art O Rama 2026 ✦
Art O Rama 2026 ✦
A dialogue between Xxijra Hii, London and DS Galerie, Paris
Oil on Linen
35 x 43 cm framed
2023
£3,800 GBP ex taxes | €4500 ex taxes
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Oil on Linen, Aluminium frame
180 x 160 cm / 70.8" x 63"
2025
£15,000 GBP ex taxes | €17,500 ex taxes
The Church of Self | Frieze Focus Presentation 2025
Stand F10 | Xxijra Hii Gallery
In The Church of Self, Glen Pudvine delves into the crisis of meaning in an increasingly secular, digitally saturated world. Through painting, performance, video and mirrored architecture, he examines how modern rituals of self-optimisation - wellness, fitness, personal branding - have replaced traditional communal belief systems, elevating individuals to prophetic status under the structures of neoliberalism.
However, Pudvine resists a simple critique. Rather than rejecting individualisation outright, The Church of Self explores how breaking things down to the personal level (the core tactic of neoliberal atomisation) can paradoxically be used to challenge the ideology itself. By foregrounding vulnerability, endurance, and imperfection, Pudvine offers a vision of individual practice as a site of collectivity and relational healing; gesturing viewers to question privatised ideals of competition, self-surveillance, and self-ownership.
Ventilation grille, surveillance camera, miniature nightclub, LCD screen, stereo speakers, robotic stage lights, media player & microcontroller
Variable dimensions
2026
Click to view video here€16,000 ex taxes | £13,800 ex taxes
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“LE DAUPHIN (PRIVATE EYE)” recreates, in a robotic form, the setting of an underground nightclub. Hidden behind a ventilation grille, this miniature scene (1:20 scale) can only be accessed through a surveillance monitor broadcasting a live feed from inside the model. The device incorporates a fully automated control system that independently operates a series of robotic lights and a sound system. Throughout the exhibition, this ghostly club takes on the qualities of a zombified space - neither fully dead nor fully alive. A place where the party persists under the heat of the spotlights, like a memory that refuses to fade.
About the booth
Art-O-Rama marks the first collaboration between DS Galerie (Paris) and Xxijra Hii (London). Conceived specifically for the fair, this presentation brings together works by Max Blotas and Glen Pudvine, whose practices converge around a shared inquiry into contemporary forms of sociability, exploring the relationships between constructed spaces, systems of representation, and the presence of the body
Max Blotas’s installations function as stage devices: temples, offices, or nightlife spaces appear as mechanized models, activated and filmed live. These worlds, which initially seem immersive, gradually reveal their artificiality. With “Le Dauphin / Private Eyes” (2026), he reconstructs the scene of an underground nightclub in a robotic form. Hidden behind ventilation grilles, this miniature architecture (built at a 1:20 scale) is visible only through a video surveillance system broadcasting a live feed of the model’s interior. The space then takes on the characteristics of a spectral place: a lingering but bodiless celebration, where collective energy remains as a trace: a mechanical memory of the party.
Faced with this collective space emptied of its substance, Glen Pudvine’s paintings reintroduce the body as a site of intensity and vulnerability. Drawing on both classical painting and contemporary conceptions of the self, his nude figures appear in situations of radical exposure, blending personal anxieties, humor and grotesque imagery. Their presence oscillates between an existential dimension and a deliberately offbeat register, where the body becomes simultaneously a mythological subject and an absurd figure: an object of contemplation, projection and staging. In “Turkish Get Up in Caravaggio” (2025), the artist depicts himself, naked and almost life-size, in an image whose frontality directly confronts the viewer with his presence.
The encounter between these two practices creates a tension between a collective space that has become mechanical and a body that has once again become profoundly singular. In Max Blotas’s work, sociability appears as a mechanical trace. In Glen Pudvine’s, the body becomes the stage for an individual ritual, somewhere between introspection, exhibition and performance. Between decor and presence, their works reinterpret certain fictions of our present.
Artist CVs
Max Blotas
Born in 1993 (FR), he lives and works in Saint-Ouen (FR).
At the intersection of engineering, archaeology and fiction, Max Blotas develops a practice that combines sculpture, installation, video and automated devices. His works often take the form of autonomous ecosystems or mechanised models in which fluids, motors, light, cables and architectural structures come together to create dynamic systems. Through these environments, the artist investigates the material infrastructures that organise our everyday lives as much as the narratives, beliefs and imaginaries attached to them.
After completing a degree in History at the University of Strasbourg, Max Blotas studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he obtained his DNAP in 2018 in Emmanuel Saulnier’s studio. He then continued his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, graduating with distinction in 2020, before returning to the Beaux-Arts de Paris to complete his DNSAP in 2021 in Ann Veronica Janssens’ studio. Winner of the Prix Jeune Création in 2022, the Dream Big & Grow Fast Prize with the Rudus Flora collective in 2021, as well as the Thaddaeus Ropac Prize – Fondation des Amis des Beaux-Arts and the Kenza Grant – Fondation de l’Institut de France in 2019, Max Blotas has exhibited extensively in France and internationally. His work has notably been presented at the Biennale de l’Image Possible in Liège, the CREA Art Center in Venice, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Yerevan, the MOMus – Museum of Modern Art – Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, and DS Galerie in Paris.
Glen Pudvine
Born in 1989 (UK), he lives and works in London (UK).
Working primarily through figurative painting, Glen Pudvine explores identity, existentialism, masculinity and the construction of the self, drawing together experiences from everyday life with references to popular culture, medieval and Renaissance painting and religious iconography. Frequently using his own body as both subject and protagonist, Pudvine approaches self-portraiture as a space in which vulnerability, narcissism, humour and performance become deliberately difficult to separate. Familiar images and art-historical motifs are reconfigured into unexpected encounters, allowing the personal to become a means of examining broader questions around belief, desire and contemporary identity. More recently, his practice has expanded beyond painting into installation, performance and visualised data, examining cultures of self-optimisation, individualism and the rituals through which identity is produced and maintained.
Pudvine studied Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University, graduating in 2011, before completing the postgraduate programme at the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2019, where he was awarded the Selina Chenevière Travel Award. In 2023 he was an artist-in-residence at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy. His work has been presented at Frieze London, the Royal Academy of Arts, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, T.J. Boulting, Gallery2 in Seoul, Matt Carey-Williams at Porchester Place and Frieze No.9 Cork Street, as well as in solo exhibitions with Xxijra Hii, London.