08/06/2026
, an artist who was on our first Turps residency, is one of four artists from Venezuela working across painting, sculpture, sound and collage. The exhibition brings together different approaches to questions of migration, belonging, memory and the reconstruction of identity in the shadow of a country in continual crisis.
She will be showing one large painting and three small claytings, which is the name she made up for paintings made out of clay.
PELUCHE EXPRESS
11 - 21 JUNE
12 - 6PM
PRIVATE VIEW
THURSDAY 11 JUNE
6-9PM
SOMERS GALLERY
96 CHALTON STREET
LONDON, NW1 1HJ
•JOSE GARCIA OLIVA
•DANIEL GREENFIELD CAMPOVERDE
•MARIA HELENA TOSCANO
•LUCIA VERA
‘Memory, as something nostalgic, temporal, but that’s also fraught with indignation, preservation, play and protest; its endemic pluralism and emotive elasticity. ‘Peluche Express’, at Somers Gallery’, is an exchange between four artists - José Garcia Oliva, Lucia Vera, Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde and Maria Helena Toscano - who through their connection with, to and from Venezuela, expand on the possible angularities of ‘memory’ and the country they no longer live in that’s still ‘home’. Through sculpture, installation, painting, sound and collage, they compose a complex and layered articulation around place, community, association, joy and longing.
To step into this dialogue it’s important to understand the context of Venezuela; we know the facts - a large country in South America, currently navigating a major political transition. We know that 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled their country in what has been recognised as the largest refugee and displacement crisis in the Western hemisphere[1]. This exodus is a generational one, where the artists hold memories of childhood, which in the face of exit and distance create ground for on the one hand a form of anthropological preservation, and on the other a deeply emotional longing and articulation of another way of being.’
