BETWEEN PLACES

Maria Pomiansky and Jonathan Ducrest

30 May - 30 August 2025

An online exclusive dynamic exhibition. Also available on Artsy.

Events:
Tuesday, 10 June 2025, 18:30-20:00 Studio visit with Maria Pomiansky RSVP

Anggrek Agency is pleased to present Between Places, an online exclusive exhibition with works by Maria Pomiansky (b. 1971, Moscow) and Jonathan Ducrest (b. 1976, Zurich).

On this occasion, both artists talk about places, exploring the tension between presence and absence. Pomiansky’s works are kaleidoscopic snapshots of life in Europe, a daily, communal life; one that is full of color and alive with movement, with layered narrative and a sense of shared experience. They evoke a world in which human presence is central, chaotic, and joyful. In stark contrast, Ducrest’s photographs, taken during the Covid-19 lockdown in Los Angeles, depict a ghost town, a city emptied of its usual rhythms. Streets, parks, and landmarks appear frozen in time, their silence echoing with absence. These images are not just documents of a historical moment but meditations on solitude, vulnerability, and the fragility of urban life.

Between Places is not just a geographical concept, it’s also a psychological and emotional state, a liminal space where memory, longing, and imagination converge.

Stay tuned as we unveil new works from both artists each week. Every drop offers fresh perspectives on presence and absence, community and solitude, movement and stillness, deepening the conversation and expanding the narrative with each addition.

Maria Pomiansky in her studio.

Maria Pomiansky (b. 1971, Moscow) is a Swiss visual artist based in Zürich. Her work explores themes of urban life, architecture, and social narratives through a multidisciplinary lens. She holds two Master’s degrees from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in Fine Arts (2015) and Scenography (2007), as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (1997).

Pomiansky has exhibited extensively in Switzerland and internationally. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Wheel of Fortune at Rosenblut Friedmann Gallery, Madrid (2025); Tryptichon, message salon embassy, Zurich (2024); 10 Jahre Salon der Gegenwart at Kunsthaus Zofingen (2024); FRRAGILE at Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur (2024); K.I. und Wir at Kunsthaus Oerlikon, Zürich (2024); Trip to Lausanne at Dreier Frenzel Architecture+Communication, Lausanne (2024); Monotypes with Edition VFO, Zürich (2023); Summer Chronicles at Vebiskus Kunsthalle, Schaffhausen (2023); and a One Wall exhibition with VFO Edition, Zürich (2020).

She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Omanut-Zwillenberg Förderpreis (2024) and the Swiss Art Award (2021). Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including those of the City of Zürich, the Swiss Post, the Kunsthaus Grenchen, and the Swiss National Library in Bern. Pomiansky has participated in artist residencies across Europe, including at Cité des Arts in Paris (2024), De Appel in Amsterdam (2019), and Museum Villa Irmgard in Usedom, Germany (2018).

Jonathan Ducrest, photographed by Parinya Wongwannawat.

Jonathan Ducrest (b. 1976, Zurich) is an award-winning Swiss photographer whose work explores the intersection of natural and urban landscapes. A self-taught artist, Ducrest began his photographic journey in the Swiss Alps and later refined his cinematic style in New York and Los Angeles. His evocative compositions have been featured in productions for Netflix, Disney-ABC, Warner Media, and Apple, and are held in private and institutional collections worldwide.

Ducrest gained critical acclaim for his series Lockdown L.A., a haunting visual essay capturing the surreal stillness of Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic. The series was published in 2020, with a second edition released in 2021, and helped establish him as a compelling voice in contemporary photography

Among his many accolades, Ducrest was named one of Saatchi Art’s “21 Artists to Watch” in 2021. His work Out of Gas was featured in the Royal Academy of London’s Summer Exhibition on climate themes, where the edition sold out within a month. In 2023, he was named Photographer of the Year in Architecture by the reFocus Awards for his series on Ricardo Bofill’s La Muralla Roja.

Ducrest’s photography has been featured in Vogue, Monocle, and Condé Nast Traveler, and he continues to collaborate with Switzerland Tourism, offering a fresh lens on his homeland’s landscapes.

Maria Pomiansky, View of my studio, 2024
Oil on canvas
150 x 150 cm
CHF 10’000

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Maria Pomiansky invites viewers into an interior spot of her professional space in View of My Studio. This large-scale painting is both diaristic and theatrical, this is the view of her old/ previous studio on Stauffacherstrasse, Zurich.

A wooden shelving unit anchors the composition. Its horizontal drawers rendered with vibrant, almost neon colors that echo modernist abstraction. Objects such as a small fan, a bottle of cleaner, brushes, and jars populate the scene. They are not placed with scientific precision but scattered with the loose coherence of lived-in realism. On the top shelf, there are paintings of female face, a recurring item on Pomiansky’s works, presumably her self-portrait. Pomiansky’s studio is not described as much as translated through a linear view of sensation, memory, and painterly improvisation. The result is a space where perception is fluid and where objects serve as both props and protagonists.

In Between Places, this work stands as a key image: a painting about painting, a reflection on how the boundaries between interior and exterior, real and imagined, are never fully fixed, particularly for those whose practice is shaped by movement, migration, and making.

Maria Pomiansky, Autoportrait at Cité des Arts in Paris, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
63 x 100 cm
CHF 4’600

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Pomiansky presents a deeply intimate and psychologically charged tableau in her Autoportrait at Cité des Arts in Paris, drawing on her experience during a residency there last year.

Set within the angular interior of her artist residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, the composition presents a divided yet interconnected domestic space: the sleeping body of another recedes under white sheets, while Pomiansky’s own figure sits exposed, contemplative, almost slumped in the foreground, bathed in a cold, diffused light. The right side of the painting shows a table cluttered with her personal things: acrylic sticks, a pouch, a lamp, and a doll's head (with painted cheeks), a recurring object on her works. A dancing figure and a mythic horse on the wall suggest inner worlds of desire, memory, or fantasy. The large window in the center doubles as both a literal aperture and a metaphorical one: a portal through which the outside world peers in or the internal world spills out.

This is a portrait not just of physical presence, but of a fractured interior self. Echoing the existential solitude found in the works of Edward Hopper and the Cubist aesthetic of Picasso, the artist confronts herself in a moment of raw vulnerability, through skewed perspectives, distorted proportions, and emotionally charged colors. Ultimately, Autoportrait at Cité des Arts in Paris is less about likeness and more about truth: the fragmented truth of being in-between. Between lovers, between cities, between the self and the world, between places.

Maria Pomiansky, Le jardín des Tuileries in Paris, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 100 cm
CHF 4’600

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In Le jardín des Tuileries in Paris, Pomiansky captures a moment suspended between the pictorial and the psychological, an impression of a Parisian garden animated by human presence, civic order, and the subtle absurdities of urban life. This is not a postcard-perfect image of a romantic Paris that we are used to; rather, it is an evocative rendition where topiary cones, classical statues, and a swirling carnival ride coexist with a monumental yellow crane, all under a wintry grey sky tinged with candy-pink.

Pomiansky’s brushes (or markers) fuse architectural clarity with emotional blur. The garden is rendered in an otherworldly palette where cool turquoise and vivid fuchsias create a dreamlike mood. The juxtaposition of classical forms (the marble-like statue in the foreground), modern construction (the crane), and ephemeral joy (the carnival ride) speaks to a layered temporality. The tension between permanence and flux, between history and the now, is obvious.

Therefore, the painting acts not only as a view but as a meditation, on beauty, change, and the absurd choreography of urban public life. It is a garden imagined not just through sight, but through memory and intuition, shaped by the artist’s experience of drifting between places.

Jonathan Ducrest, IVAR Theatre, 2020
Photograph

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Jonathan Ducrest captures the IVAR Theatre in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 lockdown, portraying it as if it were a part of a ghost town. The artist chose this particular image as the cover of “LOCKDOWN L.A.” - his photobook of places in LA during the pandemic lockdown.

In the photograph, The IVAR's neon sign is vibrant and almost defiant, contrasts with its shuttered doors. The façade glows in electric blue and crimson neon, sharply delineated against the deepening twilight, while a stark white marquee broadcasts a communal plea: “WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER – SAFER AT HOME ...”. The deep shadows and sparse lighting evoke the solitude of the American city at night, reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s paintings. Yet in Ducrest’s version, the figures are missing, turning absence into presence. For this reason, the work serves not merely as documentation but as a deeply emotional and eerie poem of halted public life.

In Between Places, Ducrest’s photo functions as a counterpoint to Maria Pomiansky’s plein air drawings. Where Pomiansky’s works are marked by lived observation and improvisation, Ducrest’s is a freeze-frame of suspended reality. Both artists explore spaces inhabited and abandoned, drawn and seen, remembered and experienced. The theatre’s façade becomes not just architecture, but a screen onto which a viewer’s own memory of the pandemic might be projected.

Jonathan Ducrest, Sunset Blvd, 2020
Photograph

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Ducrest photographed Sunset Blvd, an iconic stretch of the Sunset Strip, during a moment of near-apocalyptic quiet. Taken during the COVID-19 lockdown, the photograph presents a cityscape that is both familiar and estranged: Sunset Boulevard as it is, only dead - without the traffic and the crowds.

The Sunset Tower Hotel, a historic Art Deco skyscraper once home to stars like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, rises like a giant gravestone of celebrity myth. The palm trees stand rigid like sentinels, and the massive billboards add layers of media commentary to the visual plane. Unlike Pomiansky’s first-hand drawing practice, which enters spaces in motion, Ducrest offers a panoramic vantage point that gazes from above and outside, aligning with the surveillance gaze of contemporary urban photography.

This work draws attention to surface and silence: smooth roads, unlit neon, inactive facades. But it also exposes the latent violence of vacancy in a space built for attention. Here, emptiness doesn’t feel like a pause but more like the end. The After Life Netflix billboard seems to echo this; an unintended but poetic metatext, advertising the future as if we were still in between places.

Jonathan Ducrest, Venice Skate Park, 2020
Photograph

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