Ventriloquism

Tina Braegger, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Gowoon Lee, Daniele Milvio, Kaspar Müller

November 12 – December 12, 2026

7100 NW 6th Ave, Miami, FL

Olivia Edwards Gallery is pleased to present Ventriloquism, a group exhibition featuring works by Tina Braegger, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Gowoon Lee, Daniele Milvio, and Kaspar Müller. A ventriloquist performs alongside his accomplice, the puppet, each assuming a character whose identity depends upon the other. The audience, fully aware of the artifice, nevertheless participates in the illusion. Taking this peculiar relationship as its premise, the exhibition considers how familiar images, objects, and characters can assume unexpected identities, and how the roles of creator, creation, and observer might become entangled.

Tina Braegger returns persistently to the Grateful Dead's dancing bear, treating the borrowed emblem as a formal device through which to explore the possibilities of painting. Repetition gives way to variation, as the familiar figure becomes a testing ground for experiments in color, composition, and gesture. In The 48 Hours of Kwik and Kwak (2004), Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys inhabit two shaggy, animal-like characters for two days. The hour-long video devotes much of its attention to their hay-strewn enclosure, with Kwik and Kwak roaming about within it. Gowoon Lee appropriates fragments of animated films, isolating gestures, empty settings, and incidental details from their original narratives. Her paintings possess an almost cinematic smoothness that gives way, upon closer inspection, to the coarse texture of jute and traces of the brush.

Daniele Milvio's three bronze reliefs depict architectural fragments associated with New York, London, and Berlin. Their windows, fitted with brown reflective spy glass, return a distorted image of the viewer's own eye. Kaspar Müller's seemingly endless strings of colored glass spheres appear to drip from the exhibition's high ceilings, their reflective surfaces fragmenting the surrounding space. His light sculptures transform recognizable domestic lighting elements into unconventional sculptural arrangements.