To a Passerby

To a Passerby

Artists have always turned to sidewalks and marketplaces because these spaces concentrate society’s diversity. Streets as social theatres, microcosms of public and private life brushing against—and eventually blurring—one another, revealing society most clearly.

Yves Scherer’s sculptures are born from direct observations of this every day life. A boy lost in thoughts picking spring flowers, a woman is standing quietly observing a girl playing with her doll, while a dog is peeing on the corner. They exist together as witness of and participants in the choreography of public life. Each figure embodies personal connection, maybe social tension, or quiet reflection. In this sense their states become sites for imagining how people exist together and what futures they might share. It’s often an idealized reality that Scherer presents, employing tender tropes of romanticism with a generous sprinkle of optimism and hopefulness.

The hoardings by Sebastian Lloyd Rees function as contemporary “buildings,” symbols of place and social interaction as a stage for Scherer’s figures. Once found objects that were used as part of civic restriction and bore symbols of control, these materials have been carefully conserved, restored, and reconstructed into low-hung wall works. Lloyd Rees’s interventions reconfigure the material’s identity—from instruments of exclusion into symbols of inclusion and intellectual freedom—demonstrating how materials, gestures, and placement shape our perception and imagination of public life.

This interplay between figure and hoarding recall historical street and boulevard paintings: Camille Pissarro’s 1897 views of the Boulevard Montmartre or Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (1873–74.) In these paintings, the figures are never separate from the cityscape; they are absorbed into its flows of light, perspective, and movement, suggesting that modern life is legible precisely in the interaction between bodies and built form. Scherer and Lloyd Rees take up this legacy, showing how people and environments mutually define one another, turning the ordinary street or the fragment of wall into a stage of shared meaning.

Through their work, ordinary spaces become stages of social imagination and connection. We are reminded that art - like life itself - is made of the moments we share and the spaces we inhabit together.

Yves Scherer (b. 1987, Solothurn, Switzerland) is a visual artist based in NewYork City. Working in media spanning from figurative sculpture to oil painting and lenticular prints, he creates immersive environments that combine personal narratives with fan fiction and celebrity culture to offer the viewer an often romantic lens or perspective on the self, relationships and the everyday. His work has been shown extensively in galleries and institutions across the world, such as Swiss Institute New York, Kunsthalle Basel and the ICA London, and is part of the collection of The Portland Art Museum, The Farnsworth Museum, Kunstmuseum Olten and Kunsthaus Grenchen among others. He’s the recipient of a Förderpreis Bildende Kunstdes Kanton Solothurn 2012, a Swiss Art Award in 2015 and was listed on Forbes 30 under 30 “Art & Design” in the class of 2016.

Sebastian Lloyd Rees (b. 1986, Stavanger, Norway) is an artist based between Athens and London. With the artist Ali Eisa, he is part of an ongoing collaboration known as Lloyd Corporation. Since completing his BA at Goldsmiths in 2010, Lloyd Rees’s painting has evolved through several distinct stages; all of which interrogate the ways in which painting can articulate the subjective interactions between the artist and the ever-changing built and natural environments that he has called home.
In his first major series, the Hoarding Works (2014–2018), Lloyd Rees worked with repurposed wooden boards that had been recovered from the hoarding around construction sites in London and New York. In 2020, after moving to Athens, Lloyd Rees developed a more lyrical visual language to reflect his emerging relationship with the Mediterranean, culminating in the Black Paintings (2021–2023) – the subject of a solo exhibition at Vardaxoglou in the Autumn of 2023.