COMA is pleased to present a new body of work by Lisbon-based artist Mia Middleton (b. 1988, London, UK), featuring 24 small-scale paintings that continue Middleton’s investigations into psyche, memory and evocation. Titled Double, this will be Middleton’s debut presentation in Hong Kong and take place during the week of Art Basel Hong Kong 2025. The exhibition will exist as a one-week project alongside the launch of a monograph of the same name. The monograph will include reproductions of the paintings alongside an interview by artist Philip Hinge, an essay by writer Katya Tylevich and a text by the artist.
In her new exhibition Double, artist Mia Middleton presents a suite of new paintings tied to themes of duality and dissolution. The artist employs the motif of the double or shadow to explore a conflation of self and other; subject and object, and over the course of 24 small scale works, she treads a somnambulant boundary between multiplicity and singularity. Elusive echoes and repetitions move through the works, quietly dismantling conventional notions of the self as ‘protagonist’ in favour of a more fluid and relational perspective. In doing so, Middleton exposes mnemonic and temporal distortions right beneath our noses. As viewers, we become our own unreliable narrators, doubling back across time and space to co-construct this strange new world together.
Middleton has long been drawn to the slipperiness of self and psyche in relation to surroundings. In Double, no single work or voice is dominant; each pinprick of information seems to speak to the next. By depicting oddly familiar scenes and anonymous characters, observer and observed are conflated into one, and the line between the viewer’s recollections and the images on view becomes porous and unclear. In this way the viewer is implicated as both audience and actor; witness and perpetrator. Building on that voyeuristic frisson, covert enactments emerge in the works.
Shadows and limbs blend and flex, figures spy on us as we spy on others, coverings expose more than they conceal. Condemned to our shaky and amorphous reflections, we must locate ourselves in unconventional, abstract ways. Double seems to set us on that path, poking holes in familiarity and continuity in order to make way for the wider miasma of consciousness and corporeality.
Each of the uniformly scaled paintings comprising Double will be housed in customised metal stands that fit the exact dimensions of the image. The stands will be equal in height and size and installed in spatial sequences throughout a monochromatic gallery space, enabling the viewer to roam through them and navigate dispersed series of works physically. As a viewer’s position and perspective changes, so will the array of works in view, inviting participants into a mode of embodied engagement and narration whilst also highlighting the shadows and confines of subjectivity.
The absence of a codified route or circuit through the display is integral to this body of work—through a modular format, subject and object converge, and the seduction of narrative fullness is shrouded by the unseen.
