Galerie Noah Klink is pleased to present Toy, the first solo exhibition by Welsh artist Sebastian Jefford at the gallery, on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin.
Jefford’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, drawing, painting, writing and video, yet his open-ended approach often yields hybrid forms that elude categorisation. Working with recurring materials and repurposed everyday objects, his pieces frequently carry the uncanny familiarity of scaled-up miniatures or pseudo-functional props—objects that might belong to some alternate educational display or speculative world-building model.
For Toy, Jefford presents new and existing works including large-scale wall-based sculptures and a series of sequential drawings. Jefford prepares the molds for the wall-based sculptures by hand, later pouring polyurethane on them which he later peels off and hand-paints. The sculptural works occupy the space with a grubby, plasticised presence, combining studio-crafted elements with embedded found components, such as the roof structures that the sculptures are hung on. The accompanying drawings unfold across panels like silent comics or instructional diagrams, alluding to a kind of narrative or logic that never fully resolves. Humor and unease coexist in these works, which lean into slapstick, satire and pathos while probing the edges of contemporary subjectivity.
Rooted in a visual language that borrows from cartoons, caricature, educational diagrams and speculative design, Jefford’s practice opens up a world of ambivalent characters and half-familiar gestures. At once grotesque and gentle, comic and critical, the works in Toy channel the fragmentary psyche of a society caught between infantilisation, overstimulation and political inertia. In Jefford’s universe, imagination is not a form of escape but of entanglement—a way of making sense of the nonsense, of slipping between surfaces and re-emerging with something oddly tangible. Toy invites us into this generative ambiguity: a zone where materiality meets metaphor, and staring at the sun might begin with a grimace or a grin.
Accompanying the exhibition is a text by Sean Steadman.
