Zugzwang I Petra Cortright, Alva Le Febvre, Amanda Lydért, Elisabeth Molin and Jordan Sears

Brigade is pleased to present Zugzwang, a group exhibition with works by Petra Cortright, Alva Le Febvre, Amanda Lydért, Elisabeth Molin, and Jordan Sears.

Zugzwang refers to a condition in chess where a player is forced to move, even though every possible move will worsen their position. In the exhibition, this concept functions as a prism for the contemporary paradox of humans becoming entrapped in the very systems they create. Across painting, video, photography, and installation, Zugzwang mirrors a state where engagement is inseparable from consequence, and where the acts of looking, reading, and navigating the space become an entry into a system of play - with no easy way out, only a continued entanglement into the web of structures that define our present time.

Petra Cortright (b.1986, USA) first gained recognition for her YouTube videos, before expanding her practice to include her iconic digital paintings. As a pioneer of the 'Post-Internet' art movement, Cortright uses the internet as her primary source and place, seamlessly bridging the digital and physical realms. Within the exhibition, Cortright's video work Bridal Shower (2013) explores the internet as a site of self-representation, highlighting the compulsory nature of digital engagement.

Alva Le Febvre's (b. 1999, France/Sweden) photographic series of work centers on the looking object - eyes found in toys, cartoons, and advertising. Oversized and "hyper-cute," these features are often designed to project affection, softness, and innocence. In the darkroom, Le Febvre enlarges these eyes, isolating and distorting them until their forms grow increasingly abstract and the sweetness they project begins to slip.

Amanda Lydért's (b. 1994, Denmark) series of text-based paintings take the form of modern illuminated manuscripts, exposing fragments of thought from the territory of early motherhood. Rendered in oil stick across canvas, silk, and a child's pillowcase, Lydért's confessions are deeply personal, yet carry the weight of ecological allegories. Through her words, she maps a melted chessboard of feministic instincts. One in which the maternal(tamed) and the sexual(savage) collide in a negotiation between giving and receiving.

Elisabeth Molin (b. 1985, Denmark) explores image ecology and the physical infrastructure of the digital in her series, While we sleep sharks swim between your ear and mine (2026). Interested in how LCD screens permeate our most intimate spaces, Molin investigates the afterlife of these electronic witnesses. She dismantles discarded screens to extract Fresnel lenses, polarizers, and metal parts, reconfiguring them into sculptural constellations. These technical fragments serve as containers and surfaces for everyday offerings like pigments, thorns, lenses, liquids, and eyelashes. These materials bring a sense of tactility, smell, and proximity to the industrially cut materials, reimagining its cold, monolithic remains as a site for ritual.

Jordan Sears' (b. 1993, USA) paintings are defined by a process of extraction. Through her use of color, cropping, and scale, Sears isolates fragments of bodies and garments sourced from the polished vernacular of advertising and fashion. By translating these images into the slow, dense materiality of oil paint, she suspends their circulation, exposing the visual strategies through which desire is manufactured and distributed.