Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia & Sam Llewellyn-Jones
The House of Bernarda Alba
Elizabeth Xi Bauer gallery, Deptford, London, UK
22 Nov 2024 – 25 Jan 2025
As a Spaniard, I felt compelled to explore this exhibition when I saw its title. The House of Bernarda Alba is a well-known play by Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca, often grouped with Blood Wedding and Yerma as part of his Rural Trilogy. García Lorca completed it in June 1936, two months before his assassination during the Spanish Civil War. He described the play as “a drama of women in the villages of Spain.” In a country where, in the 1930s, more than half of the population lived in towns of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, the social patterns depicted in the play were highly representative of that era.
To give some context, the play focuses on events in a household in Andalusia during a period of mourning. The domineering matriarch, Bernarda Alba, wields absolute control over her five daughters, aged between 20 and 39, forbidding them from forming relationships. The imposed mourning period isolates the family further, intensifying the tensions within the household.
Moving back to the art exhibition at Elizabeth Xi Bauer gallery, it transforms the gallery space into an immersive indoor-outdoor experience. Onwochei-Garcia’s large, suspended paintings construct a house-like environment that guides the viewer’s movement, while Llewellyn-Jones’s photographs and oil-on-pastel works create a foreboding landscape that amplifies the setting’s unease. Together, the artists evoke a layered space resonating with tension and disquiet.
As you enter the gallery, you encounter Onwochei-Garcia’s large figurative oil paintings, which hang unstretched from the ceiling to form the shape of a house or amphitheatre in the centre of the space. Llewellyn-Jones’s works occupy the walls, allowing visitors to explore the reverse side of the washi paper, revealing ‘negative’ or inverted underpaintings.
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia, born in Bristol, UK, lives and works in Glasgow. In 2023, she was selected as a recipient of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries award. She was also shortlisted for the Robert Walters Group UK New Artist of the Year Award, with her work included in the accompanying exhibition at Saatchi Gallery in London.
Onwochei-Garcia’s works are particularly poignant in the context of this exhibition. Painted in shades of red, black, and brown, her pieces depict barely human figures in an atmosphere of unrest, effectively conveying pain and trauma. She created these works shortly after the Brexit Bill passed through Parliament, borrowing the claustrophobic setting of a nearly 90-year-old play to express contemporary feelings of hopelessness.
One standout painting, Los Espectadores (2023), left a strong impression on me. It depicts figures that are part-human, part-animal, and part-indecipherable, hiding in darkness as they await a performance. The piece draws on the formalized, rigid structures of 16th-century Spanish dramas to explore the tension between those who act and those who govern. Through this work, Onwochei-Garcia reflects her belief that oppression recurs throughout history, often leaving behind feelings of isolation and denial.
Onwochei-Garcia’s artistic process incorporates art historical and literary sources, influences that are particularly evident in her smaller works on paper. These pieces echo the aesthetics of Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. The multilingual titles and mix of references nod to her layered heritage: Spanish, German, and Nigerian.
Her sense of in-betweenness is mirrored in the presentation of her canvases as sculptural elements. Visitors are invited to pass through her works, exploring their angles and nuances—an experience not always possible with wall-mounted pieces. As the artist explains, “By turning paintings into structures that refuse to display themselves [they] frustrate the looking process. You have to twist, turn, and rotate to see them. I intend to upset the privilege of spectating.”
Sam Llewellyn-Jones, born in London, works across various media, with his pieces held in collections such as the Millennium BCP Foundation (Lisbon) and UCL Special Collections (London). His contributions to this exhibition were inspired by a two-month residency at Joshua Tree National Park in California during the late summer of 2024.
The arid landscape of Joshua Tree inspired Llewellyn-Jones to experiment with techniques such as rubbings of natural elements and post-production photography. These explorations evolved into his current method of layering oil paint onto photographs, which he first began experimenting with during a 2023 residency at SÍM in Reykjavík, Iceland.
When developing prints, Llewellyn-Jones often uses a solarizing technique to enhance the eerie, anthropogenic quality of his landscapes. He then applies oil paint over the photographs, with the cracked texture of the dried paint mimicking the arid terrain depicted in his work.
Llewellyn-Jones’s art captures the evolving relationship between landscapes, time, and architecture. His images invite viewers to reflect on how natural and built environments shape human perception, revealing the silent transformations within these spaces.
I appreciated the dialogue between Onwochei-Garcia’s central works and Llewellyn-Jones’s surrounding pieces. United by themes of place, identity, and memory, Onwochei-Garcia’s work critiques contemporary surveillance, identity politics, and post-colonial narratives, while Llewellyn-Jones explores the themes of landscape and materiality, showing how environments carry layers of history and meaning.
At first, I felt that Llewellyn-Jones’s desert-inspired landscapes didn’t entirely fit the setting I envisioned for The House of Bernarda Alba. However, his works encourage us to reflect on how the spaces we inhabit transform our lives and emotions, which I found to be highly relevant to this exhibition. On the other hand, Onwochei-Garcia’s paintings effectively captured the tension and oppression that define Lorca’s play, highlighting how those in power can leave others in a state of emptiness and isolation.
Photography by The art blueberry and Chicho Puig.
Entrance to the exhibition: Free.
Leave a Reply