Palmer Gallery is pleased to present Inheritance, a new solo presentation by the London-based artist Philip Ewe, comprising a sculptural installation in the gallery’s project space, The Door, and an accompanying live performance in the gallery space.
At the presentation’s centre is Understudy (2020– 26), a fabricated scale replica of Pesci Bros, the fish and chip shop run by Ewe’s Italian immigrant grandparents in Barking for over forty years, until it was compulsorily purchased and demolished during the redevelopment of the area in the 1990s. Built by a specialist prop maker from a handful of surviving photographs, the model is a speculative, knowingly unreliable re-construction of a destroyed family building - what Ewe terms a “doppelgänger object” - rather than a memorialistic act of faithful reconstruction. This deliberate misrepresentation puts the artist’s own reliability as a narrator of his personal history under scrutiny, merging the financial asset of a building with the asset of artistic authenticity.
Understudy first appeared as a stage set within Thru the Keyhole (2021), a live-streamed performance Ewe made for Studio 3 Arts, Dagenham, during the pandemic, in which the doll’s-house-scaled shop-front became a miniature stage for a monologue that slid between motivational self-help rhetoric and an absurd telephone negotiation with a luxury property developer.
For this sculptural presentation at Palmer Gallery, Understudy is exhibited as a freestanding sculpture for the first time. The installation will be accompanied by a performance, approximately 25 minutes long, developing Ewe’s recent use of live instrumentation, first explored in Confessions / what is in this room and why do you want it? (2026), performed at St Giles Cripplegate, Barbican.
Inheritance extends Ewe’s long-running interest in urban life, autobiography and family - concerns that run through his London Land series of performances staged across South East London’s redevelopment zones, and through My Bedroom (2024), in which the entire contents of the artist’s London bedroom were transported into the gallery at Strange Field, Glasgow, as part of his solo exhibition The Fourth Wall. The work draws on the psychoanalytic figure of the double. Ewe cites Freud’s 1919 essay The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche) , in which the doppelgänger is not simply another person who resembles the self, but a figure for something within the self that has become estranged. Understudy functions as a kind of autoscopy - the sensation of seeing one’s own body from an external position, as though watching oneself from across a room - collapsing the distance between memorial, model and stage, and between family history and its performance as an unreliable, ongoing fiction.
A private view will take place at the galllery on Thursday 24th September, 6-8pm.
An artist performance will take place at the gallery on Saturday 17th October, 2pm.
