SUGAR, WE'RE GOING DOWN
ALEX MORANTE & ENRIQUE LÓPEZ LLAMAS
The Lower Gallery, TKE Studios
99 Victoria Road, Margate
Victoria House Residency
6 September – 1 November 2026
Preview: Saturday 5 September 2026, 6-8pm
Sugar, We’re Going Down borrows its title from the Fall Out Boy song that soundtracked a particular corner of Alex Morante and Enrique López Llamas’s adolescence, an era that pretty much started with the collapse of the Twin Towers and sort of ended with sparkly-skinned vampires. Perhaps that’s why Morante and López Llamas share an attraction to bodies under pressure and to the strange images that pressure can produce. Morante’s ceramics twist bodily anxiety into deteriorated creatures that seem to be mutating into fragile, vulnerable, corroded beasts, as the awareness of a body breaking down gives way to the fear of what it might become. López Llamas’s painted sculptures stage catastrophic and melodramatic displays of unsettling associations, where the anxieties of adulthood in the present world meet the persistent fear of never being enough, or not being special at all.
This shared bag of emotions finds a temporary home in a crumpled, reflective silver cave. The works, placed entirely on the floor, inhabit a space that resembles a bunker, a hideout, or the headquarters of someone who has spent too much time trying to figure out what is really going on. Its paranoid logic leaves us with the sense that something is coming, someone is listening, or that somewhere things have already gone terribly wrong.
This duo-show marks the end of López Llamas and Morante’s six-month stay at the Tracey Emin Foundation’s Victoria House Residency. It embraces how things come to an end, how materials fail, how bodies misbehave, how plans inevitably go south, and how there can be some kind of special comfort in knowing that we are all going down.
ENRIQUE LÓPEZ LLAMAS
Enrique López Llamas works across painting, video, sculpture, and installation. He draws on art history, pop culture, and personal experience, and he uses appropriation and reinterpretation as his main methods.
Fiction, memory, humour, and nostalgia run through his work. He builds projects around narrative speculation. He constructs images, objects, and scenarios that sit between the familiar and the invented, and through them he examines the cultural and power structures of contemporary life.
His work recombines inherited visual languages, holding historical distance and personal intimacy together. The result asks what it means to look at forms that already carry meaning.
López Llamas holds a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Guanajuato and completed the SOMA Educational Program in 2021. He has received the Jóvenes Creadores grant (FONCA) and the PECDA grant. His work has shown in Mexico and internationally, and it sits in public and private collections.
ALEX MORANTE
Alex Morante (b. 1994, USA) is an artist based in London who works in figurative ceramic sculpture. Her work depicts distorted beasts and figures drawn from her subconscious and from dark imagery in myth, lore, and iconography. The grotesque and the abject sit at the centre of her references, and her sculptures hold uneasy dualities in tension: growth and decay, empathy and fear, the familiar and the unknown.
A diagnosis of chronic illness brought instability and adaptation into her making. She builds complex surfaces with oxides layered under crystalline and crater glazes, calling up mold, lichen, rust, and verdigris. Kiln and chemistry act as collaborators. The unpredictable nature of ceramic processes becomes a way to manifest transformation, deterioration, and endurance directly on the form.
Morante holds a BA (Hons) in Ceramic Design from Central Saint Martins (2025). Her awards include the Mawddach Residency Graduate Award (2026) and The Jenny Walton Masters Award (2023).
VICTORIA HOUSE RESIDENCY
Invitation only
Dame Tracey Emin, DBE RA, founded the Victoria House Residency in 2025. It extends the artist community at TKE Studios. The residency gives artists a place to live and work in a restored Georgian house in Margate.