The Bell Jar begins with an ambiguous and layered image. If in Sylvia Plath’s novel the bell jar coincides with a state of psychic pressure and progressive detachment from reality, here in this exhibition it is taken as a conceptual act capable of investigating the relationship between visibility and detention, between proximity and distance, between what is shown and what resists an immediate grasp. The bell jar is not intended as a still symbol, but as a threshold that modifies the idea of contact: it allows the viewers’s gaze to penetrate the artworks without granting full access to them.

The exhibition is thought as a field of partial apparitions that bring together seven artists whose works require a slower attitude and a more intimate predisposition for an encounter. Their practice shares a focus on what remains in the balance, on what is offered without stabilizing, on those intermediate conditions in which identity, space, and matter never completely match with themselves.

In Naomi Hawksley‘s work, drawing abandons the surface to dialogue with the space, reflecting on the idea of ​​protection and domestic reflexivity. The same attention to the threshold pervades Steffen Kern‘s interior scenes, where light acts as a selective filter, building credible but never entirely transparent images. Similarly, Stephen Buscemi focuses his gaze on fragments of bodies that replace the entire figure, leaving identity unknown and entrusting detail with an incomplete narrative function. Amber Wynne-Jones‘s painting introduces a processual dimension, where the surface is constructed through layers, erasures, and returns, representing images like bodies in constant transformation. This relationship between appaearence and retention shifts to the level of the material and space in Camilla Alberti‘s sculpture, where the work presents itself as a vulnerable and relational organism, in constant dialogue with the environment and with the viewer’s body. In Mounir Eddib’s practice, the domestic dimension returns as a ritual and unstable space, a home that protects yet exposes, traversed by time, memory, and transformation.

Ruby Chen‘s research ultimately brings this tension to a more personal and psychological level, staging fragile mental structures and partial accesses to conflict. The images do not clarify, but expose a condition of restraint and pressure, where an apparent calm serves as a containment surface.

The Bell Jar does not propose a definit reading or a linear path, but rather a condition to pass. The works do not indicate a direction, but build a shared climate made of thresholds, frictions, and suspensions. It is in this measured proximity, rather than in a synthesis, that the exhibition invites us to pause.