Loosen your grip. Celia Lees

Loosen Your Grip begins from a harder truth: the impulse to control everything is not generosity, it is strain. This body of work emerges from Celia Lees’s instinct to fix, anticipate, and hold things together before they fall apart. Lees moves with the belief that control can bring clarity when things feel uncertain, but instead the pressure builds and turns inward. These paintings move through that realization. They are not about mastery, but about its limits, the point where control stops being useful and begins to erode.

The gestures resist full resolution, and the surfaces hold tension without fully releasing it. There is a push to contain, and an equal pull toward letting things slip, allowing something less fixed to exist. In some areas, the mark making is tight and condensed, almost strangled, with little space to breathe. In others, there is very little mark making at all, a loosening, a willingness to let things happen without force. The work moves between restraint and release.

The body remains central to Lees’s practice. Tightness in the body appears in the canvas itself. Made over several months, the shifts in emotional and physical state remain visible, moments of pressure and frustration sit beside moments where Lees steps back and allows the work to unfold. Control, surrender, ambiguity, and confusion remain present.

Loosen Your Grip does not resolve this tension. Instead, it stays with the discomfort of loosening, of not intervening, of allowing things to exist without constant adjustment. It asks what remains when Lees steps back, and whether there is strength in that restraint.