In parallel with the inaugural edition of VIMA Art Fair in Limassol, The Gallery 45 presents Shedding Skin, a group exhibition tracing the emotional, psychological, and bodily experience of transformation.

Featuring the work of four international artists – Alexander Charriol, Ksenia Roshar, Maïa Evarïsta Charlotte Ibar, and Pooya Razi – the exhibition examines the symbolic and literal shedding of layers that define our human experience.

“The process of shedding is not simply one of loss,” say organisers, “but one of emergence. This exhibition is about what remains, what returns and what we choose to carry forward.”

The exhibition begins with Charriol’s surreal and emotionally charged paintings, work that explores performative gender roles, sexual and interpersonal power dynamics. In these scenes, women navigate their existence in domestic and social environments while men appear as animals – predatory, passive or absurd.

A new installation by Roshar partially obstructs the corridor, creating a physical pause between the exhibition’s sections that leads to a redirection and slowing of pace. Working across mixed media, Roshar’s stitched floral interventions turn the gallery’s space into a meditation on memory and care that amplify the emotional and spatial weight of change. Her materials – fragile, found, natural, synthetic – speak to the tension between preservation and loss.

The next rooms are dedicated to the figurative paintings of Razi. His work explores how we construct our personal identity and how we frame our existence through both showing and hiding. In his work, shedding becomes a psychological excavation, a peeling away of inherited protections, inherited aesthetics, inherited silence. Razi’s paintings invite us to observe and reflect on one’s sense of self identity through time.

The exhibition continues in the gallery’s largest room with a new body of work by Ibar, whose paintings explore the spiritual, emotional and sensory dimensions of transformation. Populated with creatures from both nature and fantasy, her compositions blur the boundaries between waking life and dreams. In her world, shedding skin becomes an emotional transformation: subtle, intangible and deeply felt, like waking from a dream knowing that something within has quietly shifted.

Shedding Skin

Group exhibition by Alexander Charriol, Ksenia Roshar, Maïa Evarïsta Charlotte Ibar, and Pooya Razi. May 14-June 15. The Gallery 45, Limassol. Opening night: 6pm-9pm. Monday – Friday 10 am – 6 pm. Saturday: 10 am – 1 pm. www.thegallery45.co. Tel: 97-901106