Shanee Roe – Clinging Knots

With Clinging Knots, we proudly introduce Shanee Roe’s first solo exhibition at 68projects by KORNFELD.

Stripping away idealisation to reveal the raw, unfiltered human experience, the artist guides us through the complexities of intimacy. Playful yet unsettling, her figures exist in states of vulnerability—exposed, clumsy, fragmented. The body is neither glorified nor concealed but presented in its most honest, fleshy form, inviting a confrontation with our own perceptions of beauty, desire, and discomfort. Through ambiguity and tension, Roe challenges the romanticised narratives we construct around intimacy, opening space for questions about how we experience sexual desire and connection. In these moments of softness and disruption, we are asked to see, to feel, and to acknowledge the messy, tender reality of being human.

Shanee Roe, born in 1996 in New York, studied Fine Arts and Animation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Leipzig under Daniel Richter and Christoph Ruckhäberle. She currently lives and works in Berlin. Roe has presented her work in solo exhibitions, including Between You and Me at The Cabin in Los Angeles and Unter den Laken at Neuer Kunstverein Wuppertal. She has also participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as Luce Gallery in Turin and the Historic Hampton House Museum of Art & Culture in Miami. Her work has been shown at international art fairs, including Untitled Miami.

Exhibition statement by curator Charles Moore

Shanee Roe’s practice inhabits a space of tension—a delicate balance between intimacy and unease—entangling raw vulnerability with unvarnished desire. She turns her attention to the body in all its real, clumsy, and unflattering moments. Here, nudity is not a symbol of erotic perfection but a means of revealing identity at its most fragile and exposed. The works in this exhibition build upon Roe’s complex engagement with human connection: how bodies cling to one another in longing and tension, knotted by the messy reality of intimacy. These clinging knots resist idealisation. Through an interplay of humour, discomfort, tenderness, sexual desire, and connection, the exhibition invites viewers into ambiguous, intimate spaces where beauty and imperfection coexist—where the body is neither glamorised nor degraded, but simply presented in its authenticity.

Roe’s work thrives on contradiction. Her paintings and drawings exist at the intersection of attraction and repulsion, beauty and grotesqueness, tenderness and unease. With a playful yet unflinching engagement with the human body, she disarms the viewer, creating a world that is both endearing and unsettling. Her fleshy figures are often distorted—exaggeratedly soft, awkward, or primitively rendered—and imbued with a childlike playfulness that contrasts with the deeply adult subject matter. Her colour palette reinforces this tension, balancing muted and vibrant tones in which eroticism lingers.

At the core of Roe’s practice is intimacy—not as an idealised state, but as a messy, ambiguous, deeply human act. She rejects traditional glorifications of sex and the body, instead embracing imperfection and the awkwardness that dominant narratives often exclude. The body is not presented as an object of desire but as a vessel of identity, stripped of performative sexuality and grounded in the real.

Her figures engage in ambiguous interactions that blur the line between affection and detachment, vulnerability and exposure. Removed from defined settings, the bodies direct our attention to physical dynamics alone, leaving room for multiple interpretations. There is tenderness in these scenes of closeness, yet always a thread of discomfort—an acknowledgment that intimacy can be both comforting and profoundly uncertain.

In A Hug Not Holding, Roe visualises the paradox of intimacy: the desire for closeness alongside the presence of loneliness. Bodies merge, yet one figure dissolves through the other, spilling into hair and tears that pool on the floor. This fragmentation captures the rift between physical proximity and emotional connection—a moment where touch fails to bridge isolation.

The exhibition probes the paradox of beauty: how bodily ideals unravel when confronted with unrefined physical reality. Roe exposes the tension between what is traditionally deemed desirable or humorous and the body as it truly exists. Desire persists, even amid exposed vulnerability, producing an interplay of attraction and disruption.

In Their Space, Roe presents a nude couple in awkward, elongated forms that defy aesthetic expectation. Their greenish skin contrasts with a vivid orange ground, underscoring their unapologetic presence. Despite ungainly poses, the figures command space with quiet authority. Here, intimacy becomes an act of self-possession rather than performance.

By presenting moments that resist categorisation, Roe highlights the fluid, contradictory nature of human relationships. Are these acts of love or struggle? Is closeness comforting or suffocating? These questions remain open, inviting viewers to sit with uncertainty rather than seek resolution.

Clinging Knots confronts the contradictions of intimacy, challenging ideals of beauty, desire, and connection. By stripping the body of romanticised perfection, Roe reveals raw physical truth—bodies that bend awkwardly, gestures suspended between affection and discomfort. Her work dismantles fantasies of erotic idealisation and proposes a deeper, more vulnerable understanding of connection—one that is clinging, knotted, and unmistakably real.

— Charles Moore