Vincent Matuschka & Gianna T
The Work of Being
31 January – 23 February 2025



The Work of Being brings together two London-based multidisciplinary artists, Vincent Matuschka and Gianna T, whose creative practices are driven by a desire to interrogate our understanding of everyday life. The familiar is taken up, turned over and reframed to disrupt the norms that structure our daily existence. This duo-exhibition takes childhood as a lens through which to offer alternative perspectives that inform, and transform, questions of self-expression in adulthood. Here, children’s experiences and creative energy become impetuses to tease out the relationships between subjectivity and artmaking, play and labour: in short, ‘the work of being’.

Vincent Matuschka’s sculptural installation The Yes-Sayers (2025) reimagines the form of a children’s toy in a social commentary that examines the ways in which our environments shape, and might even curtail, our capacity for critical thinking. A group of semi-anthropomorphised animals dressed in the office uniform of a shirt and tie are conceived as roly-poly toys trapped in continuous motion. Mechanically activated, they rock back-and-forth, their rounded bottoms preventing their seemingly inevitable toppling.

Compulsively nodding in a gesture of agreement, the bobbing animals represent the outlook of individuals entrapped within the limitations of their own small slice of the world. The act of play evoked by the form of the toy is transformed into an expression of complicity and loss of subjectivity as the characters are cast as cogs in a capitalist machine of labour. Uniting humour with critique, The Yes-Sayers brings to the fore the subtexts that underpin markers of socio-economic success to ask how the bounds of individuality and personal expression might be delineated by the daily contexts in which we exist.

While Matuschka juxtaposes play and professionalism to physicalise oppressive modes of conformity associated with adulthood, Gianna T celebrates the productive possibilities of children’s creativity through performance.

In Once Upon a Time (2025), the blank canvas becomes the site of improvised artistic expression and intergenerational collaborative experimentation. Incising holes in the stretched canvas so it can be worn, the artist casts his body as a continuous extension of the work, quite literally enlivening the traditional medium. In the course of performance, he invites a group of children to unleash their artistic expression through paint without discriminating between canvas, body and the surrounding wall. Through responsive choreography, he welcomes the unexpected cues that emerge from this improvised mark-making, allowing his movements to be led by the young artists’ unfolding treatment of the canvas.

Even while Gianna T’s body disrupts and agitates the surface of the painting and its surrounding space, agency is dispersed, reactive and non-hierarchical, asserting the generative possibilities of collaboration. Here, a set of oppositions are brought into contact and their binaries troubled: distinctions between the artist and the painting, the human and the non-human, individual intent and creative expression. The performance, and its material afterlife in the gallery space, asserts Gianna T’s conviction in the fundamental power of bringing a child-like curiosity to our experience of the world – a curiosity that foregrounds the instinctive and the embodied to invite in the unexpected.

Together, the works in the exhibition ask us to redress what might constitute ‘the work of being’. When considered in the context of childhood, the act of artmaking is frequently cast as one of freedom and creativity. Yet, with the passing of years and passage from childhood into adulthood, artists often find this previously liberated mode of expression stifled by the intrusions of work and notions of labour. These obstacles may come in the form of external pressures – the structures of the artworld or a lack of time, energy, resources and economic viability – as well as internal pressures – crises of confidence, internalised judgement and self-censorship. Being, and its translation into artistic self-expression, becomes work.

However, this exhibition proposes that when considered in a different light ‘the work of being’ might take on new, revitalised resonance. The idea of ‘work’ is shifted away from capitalist contexts of economic productivity and instead understood as an expression of dedication: the labour of honing a skill set, of self-reflection and the development of a muscle memory that allows artists to sculpt form, wield a paint brush or perform. Recontextualised in these terms, work becomes a necessary process through which art is created at any age – from childhood to adulthood – and facilitates the generative possibilities of self-development, an experimental creative practice and a connection with community that gives power to artmaking today.

— Kitty Gurnos-Davies




Vincent Matuschka (b.1993, Germany) completed a BFA at the Chelsea College of Arts, London in 2022 before graduating with an MFA from Goldsmiths University, London in 2024. He has participated in recent exhibitions, including Sacred Land, Saatchi Gallery, London (2024); Another Day Another Archetype, Lewisham Art House, London (2023); Toxic Flowers and Spring of Life, pop up, Dresden (2023); and the four-person show It Could Rain In A Room This Big, SEAGER Gallery, London (2023).

Gianna T (b.1993, Italy) attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino for three years before emphatically leaving to free himself from the constraints of the academic study of art. He has presented work in recent group exhibitions, including As Small As Eyes, Tellus Triannual, Greatorex Street, London (2025); Living Rooms, UNOBIS, Padua (2024); and Lewisham Illuminations, SET Lewisham, London (2024). In 2022, his debut solo exhibition, Life is Beautiful,took place at 9 French Place, London, curated by Hector Campbell.


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