Kevin Kramer Gallery is pleased to announce Interiority, a four-person exhibition that examines the interior as a charged site of intimacy, self-fashioning, and psychological projection. Bringing together the work of Mohammed Adel, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Paul-Sebastian Japaz, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, the exhibition traces how contemporary photographic and painting practices engage interior space not as a backdrop, but as a collaborative architecture that receives and refracts the complexities of human presence.
In the charcoal drawings by Mohammed Adel, the artist continues an ongoing inquiry into the shifting relationship between memory and lived experience. Drawing from the rooms and objects of the family home, he probes the emotional resonance embedded within familiar spaces. As the eye adjusts to the darkness, we begin to register the interiors of the rooms. Each work explores the discrepancy between what is remembered and what is real, how memories can be startlingly vivid yet partial, distorted, or entirely reconstructed. Through this tension, the artist translates the instability of recollection into visual form, transforming the domestic environment into a site where presence and absence, accuracy and invention, continuously intersect.
Moving between documentary strategies and meticulously orchestrated tableau, Philip-Lorca diCorcia approaches the interior as a stage on which the tension between the everyday and the cinematic becomes palpable. His images possess a precise, almost forensic stillness, where domestic rooms and anonymous apartments hum with narrative potential. diCorcia’s interiors oscillate between fact and fiction, foregrounding the subtle performativity embedded in private space.
Paul-Sebastian Japaz extends the thematic focus of the exhibition through atmospheric, architecturally inflected scenes that explore the interior as a repository of memory and emotional residue. Working with blurred thresholds, fractured perspectives, and a subdued palette, Japaz constructs spaces that feel simultaneously inhabited and distant, inviting viewers to experience the psychological contours of rooms shaped by recollection, longing, and absence.
Across his studio-based portraits, Paul Mpagi Sepuya destabilizes conventional relationships between photographer, subject, and viewer. By layering mirrors, drapery, and visible studio apparatus, Sepuya transforms the interior into a relational field where queer desire, vulnerability, and the mechanics of image-making fold into one another. His interiors invite viewers to enter a scene constructed through intimacy rather than clarity, revealing the studio as a place where identities are simultaneously formed and unraveled.
Whether through Sepuya’s collaborative studio environments, diCorcia’s charged stillness, Japaz’s spectral architectures, or Adel’s memory evocation, each artist furthers our understanding of the interior as not purely a physical space but also as a psychological one: the private space as a site of intimacy, estrangement, and narrative formation.
On view at 121 West 27th Street #702, New York
Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6 pm or by appointment
Artist Biographies
Mohammed Adel (b.1997 London, UK) is a Bangladeshi-British painter whose practice is rooted in the exploration of memory, domesticity, and the spectral presence of the past within the present. Drawing on a personal archive of familial photographs and the emotional geography of his East London home, Adel crafts paintings that function as intimate meditations on the nature of memory and the architecture of the remembered self. His work is characterized by a masterful handling of light, a technique he employs to guide the viewer into a space of contemplative darkness. Adel frequently uses soft, enveloping light, often a faint interior glow or the dim reflection off a surface, juxtaposed with harsh color. This chiaroscuro effect is a deliberate sensory mechanism, forcing the viewer’s eye to slowly adjust, mirroring the way a child navigates a house at night, guided by spatial memory and the faint glimmers of light. Through this sustained visual engagement, the viewer's perception sharpens. Initially obscured forms and textures gradually emerge from the dark, rewarding attention with new, subtle details that deepen the painting’s narrative and emotional resonance. Adel's canvases invite a deeply personal and often nostalgic connection with the universal themes of home, heritage, and belonging. Adel received his BA from Camberwell University of Arts London and is currently studying at The Royal Academy, pursuing his MFA. He has exhibited most recently in Art Dubai with Jhaveri Contemporary (2023), Brighton Art Festival (2023), at French Riviera Gallery (2022), Art Bypass Gallery (2022), and The Factory Project (2021).
Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951, Hartford, CT) is known for his meticulously planned photographs of friends, relatives, anonymous strangers, pole dancers, and street hustlers. Posing his subjects in preconceived yet seemingly random positions and contexts, diCorcia’s images explore the tension between natural behavior and performance. His work defies classification as either documentary and theatrical, but lives in the juxtaposition of the two, much like our own multifaceted presentations of self. Philip-Lorca diCorcia attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received his MFA from Yale University in 1979. The artist had his first solo museum exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1993. Since 2007, his work has been represented by David Zwirner, where he has had four solo exhibitions at the gallery’s New York location, one in their London space, and one in their space in Hong Kong. The artist has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1997); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2000); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2003); Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2006); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2007); and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008). In 2012, work by diCorcia was included in a major retrospective on the American artist Edward Hopper at the Grand Palais, Paris. In 2013, a major career-spanning survey of diCorcia's work, consisting of more than one hundred photographs from six series, was organized by the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. The exhibition traveled later that year to De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands, followed by The Hepworth Wakefield, England, in 2014. Works by diCorcia are held in public collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The artist lives and works in New York.
Paul-Sebastian Japaz’s (b. 1992, NJ) painting practice explores the influence of space on human behavior and identity formation. The work contextualizes Queer identity within the mundanities of daily routine through the architecture of both intimate and public life. Through oil on canvas, Japaz renders scenes that explore the dichotomy between the psychological safety offered by private quarters and the inherent exposure of external environments. His visual lexicon often incorporates domestic interiors as sites where personal identity is negotiated away from the public gaze. Conversely, his paintings also interrogate external settings as zones where the Queer subject must navigate issues of visibility, power, and belonging. Japaz reflects that positive space is a privilege afforded to the powerful, and his work subverts conventional spatial hierarchies, creating room for queerness to define a place of its own. His paintings are not simply representations of space; they are acts of spatial reclamation, self-affirmation, and presence. The tension between aspiration for belonging and the reality of exclusion forms the emotional core of his distinctive practice. Paul received his BFA in Fine Art from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2017. He has exhibited in group shows including Lamb Gallery, London (2025); Sesto Al Reghena Torre Campanaria, Piazza Castello, IT (2024); Zepster Gallery, New York (2024); Timothy Taylor, New York (2024); The Reef, Los Angeles (2003); The Hole, New York (2023); Below Grand, New York (2022); Vermont Lab, Maine (2022); and Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York (2021). He has also completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Palazzo Monti Artist Residency.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a photographer whose work acts as a deep exploration of intimacy and selfhood. Sepuya's projects dismantle the notion of the singular, fixed photographic subject, instead presenting fractured, layered, and often self-reflexive compositions. This approach incorporates elements like mirrors, velvet backdrops, and printed photographs—sometimes including his own previous work—within the frame, transforming his studio space into a subject in itself. This layering acts as a material metaphor for the complex and constructed nature of identity and representation. A central thread in his work is the exploration of homoeroticism and queer creative collaboration. Sepuya frequently photographs his friends, lovers, and fellow artists, establishing an explicit dialogue about the power dynamics, consent, and shared intimacy inherent in the act of making a portrait. Sepuya’s practice is conceptually grounded in an exploration of the material and metaphorical meaning of blackness inherent to the medium of photography. He draws attention to the historical biases embedded within photographic technology, particularly how film and digital processes have traditionally been calibrated around white skin, making the accurate or nuanced representation of black subjects a technical and conceptual challenge. By incorporating deep black backdrops and using his own body and the bodies of other Black subjects within his layered images, Sepuya reclaims and recalibrates the visual space, using blackness not as an absence, but as a material presence that informs, reflects, and critiques the very language of the photographic medium. Sepuya has had solo exhibitions at Bortalmai Gallery, New York (2025), Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England (2024); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2022); Document, Chicago, IL (2021) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE (2020). A survey of work from 2006-2018 was presented at CAM St. Louis and the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston. Other recent exhibitions include those at the Leeds Art Gallery, V&A Photography Centre, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, and a project for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. He is Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California San Diego. Sepuya's work resides in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Getty and Guggenheim Museums, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, MoCA Los Angeles, MoMA, SFMoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.