Edward Thomasson — Doctor Theatre
Curated by Dorothea Jendricke
04.26 — 05.31.2025
Abraham & Wolff is pleased to present Doctor Theatre, the first solo exhibition in France by London-based artist Edward Thomasson.
Born in 1985 in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Thomasson’s work spans painting, drawing, video, writing, and performance. His practice is rooted in the poetics of group behaviour, the fragile architecture of interpersonal care and the challenges of intimacy and sexuality. Often working collaboratively with trained or untrained performers, with friends and composers, his performances involve singing, acting and choreography to explore how people gather around desire and longing, and attempt to support one another.
Thomasson’s works on paper carry the distinctive energy of his live performances. With their choreographed liveliness and dynamic gestures, they offer moments of introspection and a strange joy. In Doctor Theatre, a new series of watercolours continues his investigation into the negotiations of everyday encounters.
The exhibition takes its title from theatrical folklore. Doctor Theatre is the name given to the phenomenon whereby a performer, feeling ill, goes on stage to perform regardless, and makes a miraculous recovery just for the time they are onstage.
Central to the show is a chorus-line of figures arranged along the perimeter shelves of the gallery. Sharing the exhibition’s title, these characters extend Thomasson’s ongoing reflections on repetition as both structure and metaphor. In a new departure, attention shifts to the individual moment of transformation: each figure appears suspended mid-gesture, poised between descent and elevation. Their awkward, stylised poses are taken directly from El Pelele (1791–92) by Francisco de Goya. The painting is also known as The Straw Manikin, an early Goya painting with a soft palette and celebratory surface that veils a quietly ominous undercurrent. Thomasson channels this duality in his own figures, which are simultaneously animated and immobilised, comic and tragic, suspended but seemingly on the verge of collapse. Still, they retain a distinct gracefulness in their suspension.
Alongside the Doctor Theatre series, Thomasson presents two new works on paper that expand his visual language around gesture, emotion, and the social stage. No one is ever as fluent in sex as they are in your head, a large-scale work, describes a feeling of stuckness or impasse, while also bridging the public exterior of the street with the introspective space of the gallery. In It’s already happening, a framed watercolour, he continues his exploration of emotional choreography and spatial intimacy.
Doctor Theatre follows several recent projects. In April 2025, Thomasson premiered The Whole Routine at London Performance Studios, a musical performance created with composer Charlotte Harding and songwriter Robbie Ellen. Developed over several years in workshops, songs and movement are used to reflect on the bodily language of coping mechanisms. In 2024, his performance Grace and Harmony was presented at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and Channels V was shown at Lateral in Rome and at Phillida Reid in London. In the latter, a series of pastel cut-out paper figures are suspended on string like a garland, both supported and bound by the same gesture. Thomasson’s 2023 exhibitions Burning Desires and Endless Love introduced large, linen-mounted paper works. These depicted bodies are bending into letterforms, lining up to carry a shared weight, or merging in acts of symbolic penetration with gestures of connection, burden, and mutual dependence.
Dorothea Jendricke, April 2025
