Hands-on is pleased to present Holding Pattern, a solo exhibition of recent works by Alex Close.

Alex Close’s paintings unfold within the unstable terrain where labour, perception, abstraction, and the body converge. Drawing from personal experiences of self-monitoring, overextension, and the commodification of bodily and mental capacities, Close examines the contemporary condition in which the body is no longer merely lived through, but continuously optimised, disciplined, and negotiated within systems of precarity. Her works emerge from the pressures of inhabiting a culture that frames endurance as virtue and self-exploitation as aspiration - where productivity becomes inseparable from identity, and where the rhetoric of competition, resilience, and constant improvement transforms everyday life into a perpetual wager.

Underlying the exhibition is a sustained engagement with the body as both instrument and site of resistance. Close’s paintings repeatedly return to moments of tension: the pulling back of an arrow before release, the destabilised body searching for orientation, the instant before a leap or collapse. These are not depictions of movement in a literal sense, but conditions of suspended anticipation - states in which the body calibrates itself against invisible forces and uncertain outcomes. Labour appears here not only as physical exertion, but as psychic management: the continual disciplining of thought, gesture, attention, and emotion demanded by contemporary systems of work and self-governance.