Gallery Vacancy is pleased to announce Body Bond, the second solo exhibition by Vivian Greven with the gallery, showcasing her recent works on view from September 20 to November 1, 2025.
This exhibition continues Vivian Greven’s exploration of the body as a site of flux, positioning images as realms for perception, emotion, and connection. Drawing from classical sculpture, cinematic stills, and found material from the internet, Greven transforms the human form into a locus of meditation on intimacy and displacement. Her paintings bridge historical ideals and contemporary visual culture, tracing how gestures of touch and desire are continually reimagined across shifting physical and digital contexts, presenting the body not as a fixed identity but as a state of becoming in which sensation takes precedence over definition.
Greven extends faux-frames that produce an illusion of layered depth. Bond II(2025), after Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1674),unfolds touch as a shifting sequence, progressing from the grayscale of antique sculpture to the soft hues of cinematic pink, oscillating between the sacred and the erotic. In Lau III (2025), a hand placed beside an ear renders “sound”—an intangible phenomenon—into visibility. The tripartite framing generates a sense of progressive scaling and spatial deferral, producing an echo-like effect in which the auditory is translated into a visual register.
In Bond I (2025) Bond III (2025), gestures remain unresolved: is the slip being lifted or let fall, are the hands caressing or restraining? The sheen of pink fabric intersects with the coolness of skin, leaving the viewer suspended between allure and innocence, where sensuality and naivety coexist in a fragile balance drawn through fabric.
In the 0V series, Greven replaces painterly texture, like approaching shadows, with radiant, even fields of color. Through similar and repeated compositions, she evokes a meditative mode of viewing that guides the audience away from interpretation and toward sensation. In 0V V (2025), the red ground functions as a signal that is both intimate and perilous. By flattening spatial depth, Greven allows color itself to embody the force of the body.
Maria II (2025), after Giovanni Strazza’s The Veiled Virgin (Before 1856), centers on the texture of the veil, which appears both protective and confining. In Greven’s rendering, the stone surface carries a dual quality, at once hard as rock and supple like skin. Multiple raised droplets scatter across the veil, read as both tears and raindrops. The pale blue tones and cascading folds create a sense of flowing water, so that the veil no longer functions as a static covering but transforms into a process of movement and dissolution. The image conveys innate compassion, where grief, solitude, love, and beauty converge, transfigured into a symbol of containment, a space where sensitivity and fluidity can be held and preserved.
Tic XII (2025) is based on a reproduction of the Three Graces purchased online. Greven preserves the porcelain and metal textures while faithfully rendering the flower tattoo already present on the object, placing the classical motif alongside the imprint of a contemporary circulating artifact. Through this act of translation in material and detail, the work extends her inquiry into layered perception and shifting contexts.
Throughout Body Bond, Greven redefines the body not as a fixed image but as an interrelation—an intuition of feeling that extends inward and outward. Frozen gestures, radiant color fields, and shifting frames invite viewers into states of contemplation, where meaning is less decisive than perception itself.
