In-a-gadda-da-vida
Eugenio Espinoza & Leila Galloway
Friday 17 – Saturday 21 October, 11 – 3pm
Opening reception, Saturday 18 October, 5pm – 8pm
Auction House presents In-a-gadda-da-vida, a two-person exhibition by Venezuelan conceptual (onceptual) artist Eugenio Espinoza and British sculptor (maker of things) Leila Galloway.
The exhibition marks Espinoza’s first ever UK show, bringing his radical practice into dialogue with Galloway’s material explorations rooted in Cornwall’s landscape and industrial past.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from Iron Butterfly’s 1968 psychedelic anthem. The album's title was the result of a joyful mistake — a slurred version of the phrase “In the Garden of Eden” that has transformed into something strange, enduring, and iconic. Accident, play, love, chance, mistakes, and joy resonate through this current exhibition, where both artists work with themes of deconstruction and reconstruction as ways of making meaning.
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida also acknowledges its namesake at Tate Britain (2004), where artists Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, and Sarah Lucas created a collaborative installation on themes of life, love, sex, death, and destruction. In Redruth, the title is reimagined for a new context: a meeting point of cross-cultural exchange, intergenerational dialogue, and a more tender investigation of history, memory, and form.
Espinoza, whose groundbreaking actions in the 1970s liberated painting from the gallery into the public realm, presents archival materials, film documentation, and new spatial interventions. His deconstructed grids and radical gestures of rupture find an echo in Redruth’s repurposed industrial sites. Galloway’s sculptural practice interrogates the body’s relation to architecture and environment, drawing on the town’s mining heritage and shifting landscapes through industrial materials, found objects, and performative gestures that reconstruct memory and space.
The exhibition will be accompanied by artist talks, film screenings, and community workshops. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida bridges Espinoza’s radical past with Galloway’s contemporary responses, offering audiences new ways of seeing and experiencing the intersections of art, history, and lived space in Cornwall.
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Eugenio Espinoza (b. 1950, San Juan de los Morros, Venezuela) is a conceptual artist whose practice spans painting, installation, performance, and conceptual art. Emerging in the late 1960s, Espinoza challenged Venezuela’s dominant geometric abstraction and kinetic movements, which he saw as tied to state narratives of modernity and wealth. He studied with Gego at the Instituto de Diseño Neumann-Ince in Caracas, before continuing at Pratt Institute and New York University. Renowned for “tropicalizing the grid,” Espinoza reworks modernism’s rigid structures with humor, precariousness, and tropical vitality. His seminal work Impenetrable (1972), a black canvas grid blocking exhibition rooms, redefined participatory engagement in art and is now in Tate Modern’s permanent collection. Recent exhibitions include Lucidus Disorder and La razón del coco (Baró Galería, Palma de Mallorca, 2024), and Tropical Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America (National Gallery, Singapore, 2023). He has also exhibited at MoMA, New York, and PAMM, Miami, and is a Guggenheim Fellow and Pollock-Krasner Grant, 2011.
https://barogaleria.com/artists/82-eugenio-espinoza/
Leila Galloway is a Cornwall-based artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, and sound. Her recent work investigates the tension between projection and presence, memory and material. In projects such as Homage to All the Men I’ve Ever Loved — Especially Barry, Whom I’ve Never Met (Backline West, Redruth, 2025), she constructs figures of absence and longing, exploring the space between place and form. Recent shows include Letting Out the Slack with Isaak Johnson (Stick Figure & Sons, Redruth, 2025), Hebaska (The Fly Cellars, Newquay, 2024), In the Thick of Things (APT Gallery, Deptford, London, 2024), and Sound Solid Liquid Light, a collaborative installation with SJ Blackmore, Naomi Frears, and Alice Mahoney (Two Queens, Leicester, 2024). Galloway studied Sculpture at Manchester Polytechnic and the Slade School of Art, London. She has also completed a Higher Diploma in Aesthetics and Art Theory at Kingston University. Galloway has exhibited widely in independent spaces and museums nationally and internationally.
https://www.instagram.com/leilagalloway/?hl=en
Left Image: Eugenio Espinoza, CAST ASIDE, mixed media, A4, 2018
Right image: Leila Galloway, Homage to All the Men I’ve Ever Loved - Especially Barry, Whom I’ve Never Met, installation view at Back Lane West, Redruth, mixed media, 2025
Also check out other Arts events in Redruth, Exhibitions in Redruth, Fine Arts events in Redruth.
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