Blue Shop Gallery presents
'Only Tears Can Quench These Flames'
Kaja Stumpf
Gallery 1
3rd - 27th April 2025
PV Wednesday 2nd April 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours: Wed - Sun | 11am - 6pm
Kaja Stumpf (b.1987) is a Norwegian artist living and working in London. She gained her MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, UAL in 2022. Stumpf’s recent work examines memory, self-representation and the mind-body connection. She explores the idea of selective memory and cognitive bias as a means of self-preservation and through painting, visualises the rumination of potential scenarios between past and present. Utilising staged images and the photographic family archive, she crops the scene and alters the colours to create a sense of delayed familiarity. Kaja Stumpf has exhibited at London Art Fair and Saatchi Gallery in 2025 and has a growing international collector base. This is Stumpf’s second solo show after ‘Pleasure is a far away land’ at BSG in 2024. Kaja Stumpf is represented by Blue Shop Gallery.
'Only Tears Can Quench These Flames'
I am interested in shame and the mechanism of repression, and how that manifest through unconscious biases and coping skills which control behaviour and belief.
Self-image function as reference and point of departure for my paintings, in my effort to unearth the personal mechanism of suppressed emotion. The act of cropping reduces noise and limits context, and allows me to approach that which otherwise would feel overwhelming.
As the body holds on to memories of experiences,the shame lies in the flesh even if it did not originate there - the body is not the source; it has simply taken on the burden of being the placeholder.
For a long time I believed that shame was something inside me, something to fix. That in order to be good, I would need to do everything right. Controlling the body became a way to cope with unworthiness, providing a sense of agency in the face of the seemingly unbearable.
The title of the exhibition, ‘Only Tears Can Quench These Flames’, represents the idea that certain issues can only be solved through bodily release. Engulfed in a pit of fire, burning up inside, consumed and devoured, intellectualising will only get you so far. Our beliefs shape our reality, and reality becomes a mirror, as we reflect and project, in a continuous feedback loop. Only when we accept those parts of ourselves that we keep hidden, will the grip ease and the mirror fade. The act of painting gives value to that which I believed had none.
- Kaja Stumpf 2025
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