IN-GATE Gallery is pleased to present Past Continuous, a group exhibition bringing together Anne Marie Finné, Gereon Krebber, Igor Ost, and Semyon Agroskin. Through drawing, sculpture, and an illuminated engraved surface, the exhibition explores the persistence of images, the material traces of time, and the ways in which the past continues to inhabit the present.
Memory is rarely a faithful reconstruction of what has been. It emerges through fragments, impressions, and associations, transforming as it is recalled. Images may fade, become distorted, or acquire new meanings, while certain details remain unexpectedly vivid. The past is thus not a completed sequence of events, but an ongoing process of reinterpretation.
The title Past Continuous refers to this temporal condition: a past that remains active, continually unfolding within the present. Bringing together four distinct artistic practices, the exhibition considers how images and forms retain traces of their origins while undergoing processes of transformation, concealment, and rediscovery.
In Anne Marie Finné’s drawings, the landscape becomes a space of visual memory. Her Vue Générale series, executed in graphite on paper, revisits the tradition of landscape representation through a restrained and attentive drawing practice. The landscapes are not simply records of a place, but images shaped by observation, recollection, and the history of seeing. In her works on scratched carbon paper, the drawing emerges through a more complex relationship between surface and image. The act of scratching introduces an element of removal, revealing the image through the intervention upon its support. The resulting marks carry a double significance: they constitute the image while simultaneously registering the physical process through which it comes into being. In these works, the surface becomes a site where presence and absence, inscription and erasure, remain inseparable.
Gereon Krebber’s Outofthebox series (2018) introduces a distinctly sculptural dimension to the exhibition. Comprising four works made of polyurethane foam, epoxy resin, and spray paint, the series explores the unstable boundaries between the recognizable and the unfamiliar, the organic and the artificial. Their compact yet expansive forms suggest an encounter with something that seems to belong to the natural world while resisting any definitive identification. The sculptures evoke bodily fragments, unfamiliar organisms, or objects caught in a state of metamorphosis. Their surfaces and volumes appear to retain traces of an underlying form, as if something familiar had been transformed beyond recognition. Krebber’s characteristic interplay of material experimentation, formal ambiguity, and subtle humour unsettles the viewer’s expectations, creating an experience in which recognition is constantly accompanied by uncertainty. The sculptures seem to emerge from an imagined past, retaining the elusive impression of something once seen, encountered, or remembered.
Igor Ost’s work Past Continuous (2022) gives the exhibition its title and offers a particularly direct reflection on the relationship between image, material, and time. Executed on a plywood engraving board and illuminated by LED light, the work brings together the physical process of engraving and the immaterial presence of light. The engraved surface carries the image through its incisions, while illumination introduces another dimension of perception, transforming the relationship between the image and its support. The work occupies a space between object and image, between the permanence of a physical trace and the changing experience of its visibility. The engraved marks suggest a process of inscription in which the image is neither simply represented nor merely reproduced, but materially embedded in the surface. Through the interplay of engraving and light, Ost evokes the persistence of an image beyond the moment of its creation, suggesting how memory may remain present even as its original context recedes.
In his series of drawings on ceramic tiles, Ost explores another form of inscription. The images emerge through marker drawings on a surface composed of individual ceramic elements, as exemplified by The Heart of the Forest (2025). The modular structure of the tiles introduces divisions into the image while allowing it to extend across the assembled surface. The drawn line, immediate and direct, encounters the solidity and permanence of the ceramic support. This tension between the spontaneity of the gesture and the enduring nature of the material creates a distinctive relationship between image and object. The tiled surface evokes an image that has been assembled, preserved, and perhaps rediscovered, while its divisions suggest the fragmentary character of memory itself. Rather than presenting a unified and uninterrupted image, Ost’s work allows the image to exist through the relationship between its constituent parts.
Semyon Agroskin’s Flashback series (2021) approaches memory through the experience of recollection itself. The works explore the return of images from the past, not as complete or stable representations, but as fragments that emerge through the shifting perspective of the present. The notion of the flashback suggests an involuntary encounter with an earlier moment, when an image resurfaces unexpectedly, carrying with it an emotional or perceptual intensity that may differ from its original experience. Agroskin’s works invite a contemplative engagement with these moments of return, where the past becomes visible through the very act of remembering.
Together, the works in Past Continuous establish a dialogue between different forms of inscription and transformation. Graphite, scratched surfaces, sculptural volumes, engraved wood, and light become distinct means of approaching the persistence of images and the material traces of time.
Rather than presenting memory as an archive of completed experiences, the exhibition considers it as an active process through which the past is continually reconstructed. The image remains in motion: altered by time, shaped by perception, and open to new meanings.
Past Continuous invites visitors to reflect on the fragile boundary between what has disappeared and what remains, and on the ways in which images, objects, and memories continue to shape our experience of the present.
