Dorothy Circus Gallery presents Family Business by Andrew Hem and Silent Encounters by Dulk in Rome: two solo exhibitions conceived in dialogue, in which profoundly different painterly languages converge in a reflection on transmission, belonging and the fragile continuity of living things.
On one side is Andrew Hem’s human world, shaped by the everyday gestures of work, family-run shops, markets and those small geographies in which a community unwittingly preserves its memory. On the other is Dulk’s animal world, where polar bears, rhinoceroses, elephants, whales, turtles, birds and marine creatures become the protagonists of ecosystems as magnificent as they are precarious.
Yet the two artists are also connected by a more intimate story.
For both, imagination begins with something inherited. Dulk recalls the old encyclopaedias that belonged to his grandfather, in which he drew as a child, and his father’s aviary, home each year to hundreds of canaries, goldfinches and greenfinches: a small, separate world in which his fascination with the animal kingdom took root. Andrew Hem, meanwhile, grew up alongside a father who painted constantly and who, before the family’s exile, had taught art in Thailand. Years later, returning as an adult to his father’s village in Cambodia, Hem was mistaken for his father by several elderly women.
Almost two mirror images of memory: what we receive before we even know that it will one day become part of who we are.
Dulk. From the observed animal to the imagined animal
Throughout art history, the animal has served as attribute, symbol, omen, moral allegory, exotic marvel and object of knowledge. Above all, however, art has continually oscillated between two apparently opposing impulses: observing living things and reinventing them.
Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros of 1515 is one of the most extraordinary episodes in this history of looking. Dürer never saw the rhinoceros he depicted: he reconstructed its appearance from information and images received from others, producing an anatomically inaccurate creature, seemingly clad in armour, yet so convincing that it shaped European perceptions of the animal for centuries.
Five centuries later, Dulk seems to make the journey in reverse.
The Field Notes presented in Silent Encounters place observation before fantastical invention. In the sheet devoted to the black rhinoceros, the body is studied, annotated and broken down into details; its relationship with oxpeckers, the birds that live in association with the large mammal, appears alongside information about the species, its behaviour and its critical conservation status. The sheet devoted to the polar bear explores its sense of smell, motherhood, cubs, and dependence on ice and seals. Drawing becomes image, notation and memory of an encounter at the same time.
This shift is essential to the artist’s recent practice. Dulk recounts how his experience in Churchill, Canada, in 2018, observing polar bears and belugas, transformed his method: since then, travelling, observing and photographing wildlife in its own habitat have become fundamental to his creative process. His Heritage Project, developed in part through collaborations with National Geographic Expeditions and local specialists, explicitly seeks to turn direct encounters with nature into awareness of ecosystem conservation.
The Field Notes thus place Dulk within a lineage extending from Dürer’s analytical eye to Maria Sibylla Merian’s remarkable union of art and scientific observation, and on to the zoological theatricality of John James Audubon. There is, however, a fundamental difference: the naturalist of the past recorded a presence that seemed securely established in the world; the contemporary artist observes certain species knowing that their future presence can no longer be taken for granted.
The notebook thus also becomes an archive of precarity.
A bestiary for the Anthropocene.
When Dulk moves from drawing to painting, the precision of observation does not disappear but enters into metamorphosis.
In Ocean Nomads, Oceanbound, Southern Spirits, The Journey, The Matriarch and Tidal Ghost, the animal is not simply placed within a habitat: it frequently becomes a habitat itself.
A whale carries corals and other forms of life on its body; a sea turtle seems to transform into a biological island; the elephant’s tusks in The Matriarch become branches on which birds perch; the body of the wolf in Tidal Ghost moves through land and water simultaneously and is colonised by marine life. Fantastical anatomy makes visible an ecological reality: no organism exists in isolation.
This proliferation of living things inevitably recalls medieval bestiaries, in which the visible animal always pointed towards a further meaning, and the hybrid creatures of Hieronymus Bosch, where natural taxonomy could suddenly give way to metamorphosis and imagination.
Yet perhaps the most evocative precedent lies elsewhere.
In Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Paradise Landscapes and depictions of the Ark, painting sought almost to contain the entire diversity of creation. Mammals, birds, fish and exotic species were brought together in an encyclopaedic vision in which multiplicity signified abundance and order.
Dulk inherits something of that wonder, but paints it after the loss of ecological innocence.
His Ark is no longer necessarily a ship. It may be a whale, a turtle, an elephant: a living body carrying other bodies. Abundance no longer represents the certainty of an immutable natural order, but the extraordinary complexity of a balance that can be broken.
In The Journey, a polar bear and cubs emerge in a glacial landscape dominated by the monumental body of a whale, on which signs resembling pictograms appear. It is difficult not to think of an even more distant memory of the animal image: Chauvet and Lascaux, where living creatures almost precede our idea of art history, and the animal occupies the centre of the image because it occupies the centre of existence.
Dulk restores that monumentality to the animal today, precisely when its real presence is becoming more vulnerable.
Paradise after innocence.
There is, however, a fundamental paradox in Silent Encounters: a discourse on environmental fragility is constructed through images of extraordinary allure.
Dulk does not choose the iconography of catastrophe.
Marine turquoises, almost unreal pinks, oranges, plumage, corals, blue ice and boreal skies create a sensorially saturated, seemingly generous world. The painting possesses the seductive quality of a paradise.
Then, slowly, something begins to fracture. Species and habitats overlap, the ice becomes unstable, bodies become refuges, and the animal literally carries its ecosystem upon itself. Wonder already contains the possibility of loss.
Dulk has described his works as the result of memories accumulated during journeys to remote territories, where he has witnessed both the beauty of the natural world and the deterioration affecting it.
Painting thus becomes a form of closeness. Before asking viewers to care about something, it allows them to desire its survival.
The title Silent Encounters seems to encompass precisely this movement: the artist’s real encounter with the animal, the imagined encounter between species within the canvas and, finally, the silent encounter between the painted animal and the person looking at it.
Andrew Hem. An inherited geography.
While Dulk observes the continuity of species and ecosystems, Andrew Hem turns his gaze towards another form of habitat: the human one.
Hem’s biography is inseparable from an interrupted geography. Born while his parents were fleeing Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge genocide and raised in Los Angeles, the artist developed his visual language between the rural animist culture of his Khmer ancestors and the urban energy of the American city, where graffiti became one of his earliest forms of visual education.
His painting has always inhabited this in-between condition. Real places and mental landscapes, city and nature, memory and the present do not oppose one another, but seem to settle in layers upon each other.
In Family Business, this geography becomes more intimate.
A workshop, a small shop, a market, a street stall or a fish shop becomes a place where everyday life leaves its traces. A woman works, absorbed, at a table; elsewhere, someone cleans, prepares, sells or arranges. Nothing exceptional seems to happen, and for that very reason each gesture appears to belong to something that precedes it and will continue after it.
The history of painting has often recognised a particular form of permanence in these small gestures. From Dutch genre painting and Vermeer’s interiors to the dignity Jean-François Millet accorded to labour, everyday activity can become the place where a life makes itself visible without needing to be exceptional.
In Hem, however, that tradition passes through a contemporary, diasporic sensibility.
The light is electric. It comes from a bulb, a shop window, an aquarium or the neon of a street at night. Violet settles on the asphalt, yellow warms a worktable, and blue seems to carry the dampness of the night. One can almost sense the water on the market floor, the noise of the street, the smell of fish, food, pigments and paint.
These are images in which memory seems still to possess a temperature.
Family Business: what passes from one hand to another.
The exhibition’s title, however, invites us to move beyond the representation of work.
For Hem, transmission has a specific personal history. His father painted and had taught art before the family rebuilt their life in the United States. Hem has recalled finding even his schoolbooks filled with his father’s drawings as a child, and only realising as an adult that he had inherited the same impulse. During his first return to Cambodia, while visiting his father’s village, several elderly women mistook him for his father: an almost perfect overlap of face, generation and memory.
Within Family Business, then, a shop can be read as a place of transmission.
A craft passes through the hands; a recipe through taste; a way of arranging objects through observation; knowledge can be acquired simply by spending enough time alongside someone.
The family thus becomes a kind of archive without an inventory, in which what is preserved is not necessarily written down: it survives in gestures, rhythms, places and habits.
And it is precisely here that Family Business meets Silent Encounters.
Two forms of inheritance
Dulk and Hem belong to vastly different histories, cultures and figurative languages, yet both seem to ask what allows something to continue to exist.
For Dulk, it is the biological network connecting a species to its habitat and species to one another. For Hem, it is the human network through which memory, knowledge, identity and belonging pass from one generation to the next.
Even their biographies seem to hold this same question in miniature.
Dulk finds animals first in his grandfather’s encyclopaedias and then in his father’s aviary; Hem finds drawing in his father’s hands before recognising it in his own.
As adults, both then undertake a journey towards their origins.
Dulk gradually leaves behind the images of books and the internet to encounter animals physically in their habitats; Hem returns to Cambodia and travels through the places where his family’s history was violently interrupted.
For neither artist is the journey an escape from their origins, but a way of returning to them with a new gaze.
And perhaps this is the deepest relationship between the two exhibitions: inheritance not as something that remains motionless in the past, but as something that must continually be passed on in order to remain alive.
An ecosystem, a species, a family and a culture are profoundly different realities, yet they share a vulnerability: none survives alone.
Dulk looks at the fragility of biodiversity at a time when human activity is altering balances formed over immense evolutionary timescales. Hem, meanwhile, looks at the small human ecosystems through which an identity continues to recognise itself despite migration, loss and transformation.
In both, painting holds on to something before it becomes absence.
Perhaps this is why Dulk’s animals look at us so insistently, while Hem’s figures often seem entirely unaware of us. The former return our gaze; the latter remain immersed in their gestures.
Between these two ways of looking, the space of the exhibition opens up: a silent encounter with what still exists, with what we have received and with what we choose to leave behind.
