AMERICA

Paintings:

Oil on canvas, 104cm x 102cm

2025

Installation:

Heshta

Metal,

3cm x 3cm x 12cm

2026

Part of the curatorial text:

[…]In contrast to the rest of the exhibition, this room is saturated entirely in red, a choice the artist describes as imparting the space with rupture, dramatic intensity, an all-encompassing, almost engulfing presence. Within it, only two paintings face one another like suspended moments in time: America 1 and America 2.

On the left, a child wears a well-loved sweatshirt bearing on it the word America—a mass-produced promise, a dream. This figure is the artist herself, curled up and sad, yet skeptical of the dream before her: perhaps a vision of a bygone America. On the right, the children embody a more aggressive, forceful America, the power that shatters illusion. Also, these works, as the ones in the first room, possess a sketch-like immediacy; once this solemn, reflective gaze is reached, the works are considered complete. Matilda repeatedly guides the viewer from collective identities to solitary interiority.

At the same time, AMERICA is not about the “real” country, but rather crystallizes a long-standing collective imagination of it. Here, America appears as a planet caught between orbit and collapse, recalling Jasper Johns’ American Flags. Yet in Odobashi’s version (Heshta, 2026), the flag contains only a single star, elongated vertically until it transforms from a symbol to a sharp, almost razor-like presence.[…]

Erka Shalari, 2026