[SEOUL] Love Letters: Catherine Anholt

CHOI&CHOI Gallery presents Love Letters, a solo exhibition by British artist Catherine Anholt (b. 1958), on view from 11 July through 23 August 2025. Following her 2023 exhibition Love, Life, Loss, this second solo presentation offers an opportunity to engage with the artist’s deepening painterly journey.

After completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, Anholt settled with her family in Devon, a coastal village in the southwest of England, where she has continued to document everyday life through painting. From the winding lanes and shifting seasons of Devon to the familiar faces of friends and family, fleeting encounters with strangers on her travels, and glimpses of the broader human condition in contemporary society, Anholt captures traces of life with poetic stillness and emotional depth. Her paintings are imbued with warmth and wonder, underpinned by a quiet yet unwavering humanism rooted in hope, dignity, and empathy.

While Love, Life, Loss offered a broad reflection on universal human emotions, Love Letters turns inward, revealing the artist’s deeply personal emotional landscape. Following the sudden loss of her beloved daughter Maddy, Anholt began a new body of work as a way to remember and honour her. The Love Letters series serves as an intimate expression of grief and healing, conceived as visual letters to the departed. This exhibition stands as both a poignant tribute to her daughter and a quiet gesture of solace and shared empathy for those who have endured similar loss.

A letter-writing station on the top floor of the gallery invites visitors to contribute their own short love letters, addressed to someone dear. These handwritten notes will be displayed on the gallery wall for the duration of the exhibition, gradually forming a collective artwork as more letters are added over time. This participatory element extends the artist’s message beyond a one-sided display, fostering a shared space of remembrance and connection. It encourages each visitor to reflect on love, memory, and the potential for healing through personal expression and collective experience.

Anholt’s paintings seem to dissolve the boundaries between the tangible and the imagined, offering a space where life and death, reality and reverie, grief and hope coexist and become one. Colour becomes a language of emotion, while form evokes fragments of memory, leaving a quiet yet lasting resonance. The exhibition stands as a moving testament to the healing potential of art and a reminder that contemporary painting still holds the power to touch, console, and illuminate the human experience.