SUGAR, WE'RE GOING DOWN
ALEX MORANTE & ENRIQUE LÓPEZ LLAMAS

6 September – 1 November 2026

Preview: Saturday 5 September 2026, 6-8pm

Sugar, We're Going Down settles into the strange comfort of knowing things might only go downhill from here. We're taught to expect improvement: that tomorrow beats today, that there's always something better coming. This show doesn't answer what happens when you give up on that idea, but it sits with what failure, decay, and disappointment might mean if we stopped treating them as detours and started treating them as the point.

The title comes from the Fall Out Boy song that scored Morante and López Llamas's teenage years, a stretch of time bookended by the Twin Towers falling and vampires learning to sparkle. Maybe that's where the shared pull toward bodies under strain comes from, and the odd pictures that strain makes. Morante's ceramics turn bodily anxiety into corroded, mutating creatures, caught somewhere between fragile and monstrous. López Llamas's painted sculptures stage messier scenes: the fear of never being enough, dressed up as catastrophe.

Both bodies of work live on the gallery floor, inside a crumpled silver space that feels part bunker, part hideout, like the base of someone who's spent too long working out what's really going on. It leaves you certain something's coming, or that someone's listening, or that it's already gone wrong somewhere close by.

The show closes out López Llamas and Morante's six months at the Tracey Emin Foundation's Victoria House Residency: a fitting note, given how much of the work is about endings, failing materials, and the comfort of going down together.

ENRIQUE LÓPEZ LLAMAS López Llamas works across painting, video, sculpture, and installation, pulling from art history, pop culture, and his own life. Appropriation is his main tool. Fiction, memory, humour, and nostalgia thread through everything he makes, building toward images and scenarios that sit somewhere between familiar and invented, questioning the power structures they came from.

He holds a Visual Arts degree from the University of Guanajuato and completed SOMA's educational programme in 2021. He's received the Jóvenes Creadores (FONCA) and PECDA grants, and shown his work across Mexico and internationally.

ALEX MORANTE Morante (b. 1994, USA) is a London-based ceramic sculptor. Her distorted beasts and figures draw from her subconscious and from myth, lore, and darker iconography, holding growth against decay, empathy against fear. A chronic illness diagnosis brought instability into her process, and it shows: crystalline and crater glazes build surfaces that echo mould, rust, and lichen, letting the kiln's unpredictability stand in for transformation and endurance.

She holds a BA (Hons) in Ceramic Design from Central Saint Martins (2025), and has won the Mawddach Residency Graduate Award (2026) and The Jenny Walton Masters Award (2023).

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