The Uninvited Smile

‘Grace Grit Grin’, the third solo exhibition of Ilke Cop at Tatjana Pieters Gallery, deepens the artist’s ongoing exploration of how the female body is presented and judged through art and society. This time, Cop expands her practice by introducing sculptures to intensify the questions of embodiment and perception. Central to this series is her reworking of damaged porcelain figurines, objects historically associated with idealized femininity and archaic power structures. Cop reimagined the figurines by adding exaggerated, almost grotesque smiles. Across her sculptures and paintings, the bared teeth smile or ‘the grin’ is a persistent visual. Simultaneously confrontational and unsettling, Cop prompts the viewers to engage with the grace, resistance and discomfort that permeate her work.

What makes Cop’s intervention to the figurines particularly powerful is how a single alteration can completely shift traditional representation. By modifying just one element, she disrupts what we have been conditioned to accept as normal. During a recent artist talk at KMSKA, program curator Siska Baeck, called the figurines “little art monsters”. A striking choice of words as the image of a woman is expected to be soft, graceful, and implicitly obedient. The added grin no longer complies with societal expectations of femininity, thus creating “monsters”? Cop creates a composition that feels deliberately “wrong.” It is a smile that was neither invited nor anticipated.

Fueled by her background as art historian, Cop is very aware of her position as an artist and the impact art can have on its audience. Her work opens up critical questions about patriarchal structures, probing why the unexpected can make us uneasy and what that discomfort reveals about our own perspectives.

These so-called “art monsters” are the protagonists of the exhibition, appearing as both sculptural figures and recurring characters within Cop’s paintings. While her practice continues to draw on her own likeness as a starting point for representing the female body, this series marks a shift in her method. She closely studies the postures of the porcelain figurines, restages them through photographs of herself, and then translates this exploration onto canvas. The resulting images are not straightforward self-portraits, but rather investigations of how the female body has traditionally been framed and controlled. The nudity in her work is not meant to be erotic; instead, it functions as a shared, universal language that connects viewer and subject. In a time when the depiction of the female body has become increasingly politicized, Cop invites us to look beyond established boundaries.

The color yellow appears abundantly throughout the exhibition, carrying a personal resonance for Cop. It references the first color she perceived upon regaining consciousness after fainting. Though she describes it as medically insignificant, it showed her how the body can unexpectedly shape visual experience. Translated into her practice, yellow becomes part of an expanded visual language through which Cop interrogates representation and unsettles expectations around the body and perception.

As an additional layer to the exhibition, Cop curated a complimentary presentation titled [Guest], selecting work from the oeuvre of internationally acclaimed artist Kendell Geers. Although though Geers’ practice flirts more with Minimal and Conceptual Art, the two artists share a critical engagement with the underlying structures of art history and power. Where Cop’s work is dominated by the unsettling presence of the grin, Geers subtly integrates dark humor and a sharp linguistic edge into his visual strategies. The work ‘Here Lies Truth’ is a perfect example. See what he did there?

Ultimately, Cop aspires for the encounter between her work and Geers’ contribution to leave a lasting impression on the viewer. Whether that effect is a sense of discomfort or a subtly sharpened critical awareness, she invites audiences to exit the exhibition thinking differently than when they entered—questioning assumptions they may not even have realized they carried with them.

Cop dedicated the exhibition to Louise Delanghe.