Downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery is proud to announce their long-awaited, debut solo show with Dutch artist Handiedan, entitled Torus, opening Saturday, November 2nd in the Main Gallery.

Handiedan’s work involves a complex cut and paste mixture of digital and highly detailed sculptural hand cut collages, complimented by conscientiously collected antique ornamental frames. Featuring 33 new works, including pieces that utilize augmented reality, Torus is a breathtaking body of work and Handiedan’s biggest show to date; promising to take you on a journey through time and energy, plus give you a peak into the artist’s mind, vision, fascinations and creation process.

With Torus, Handiedan reaches a new stage on her artistic journey, aimed at capturing the energy release underpinning the core of life in all its visible and invisible manifestations. She has once again embarked on the creative challenge of giving a powerful visual translation to the dynamic flux ruling the universe across space and time.

Handiedan's artistic interpretation of how the universe creates and sustains life is the outcome of a complex and multi-layered process involving both the thinking and the making stages. The seeming ease of Handiedan's distinctive art is the visually masterful synthesis of her delving into the enduring wanders of creation. Her inspiration goes hand in hand with her scientific disposition as she incessantly taps into the laws of Quantum Physics and Sacred Geometries, at that crossroad where science and spiritual realm inextricably and happily blend.

Similarly, to her use of the Golden Ratio, the Fibonacci sequence and fractal systems, Handiedan's quest for a visual rendition of the harmonious rhythm of the cycle of life finds its ideal compass in the torus form around which the artworks comprised in the show are composed. The donut-shaped torus is a three-dimensional motion pattern that visually charts how the cycle of life perpetuates itself in sustainable systems at all scales through an invisible release of energy continuously permeating and connecting everything in eurythmic balance.

In Handiedan's masterfully layered digital and hand-cut collages every visual element is interwoven within the whole as to mirror the interconnected depth of reality. Layer upon layer, a toroidal dynamic interchange runs back and forth from the foreground to the background and back, allowing for an interplay of mutual relations and resonances amongst the diversity of elements filling her lavishly textured artworks, where a variety of objects and recurring symbols are kept together by compositional relations and personal associations lending weight to Handiedan's kaleidoscopic vision.

In the foreground, sensuous women whose iconography is drawn and from well recognizable eras are digitally assembled in mischievously alluring poses or meditatively absorbed in their own thoughts. They personify the universal power of love while clearly and explicitly displaying their multi-sexuality as one of the many ways by which this natural power can be individually felt and lived.

The two figures floating in a loving and passionate embrace in “Dodecahedron” (far left image above)) become so inextricably tied together that they merge into each other in a reciprocal qualitative exchange. Handiedan's chromatic choice adds further visual evidence, the red tones the woman on the right immediately evoking a sensual charge while the viridian green of the left one releases a quietly meditative feeling. Individually they embody two opposites qualities entailed in love, the sensual and the spiritual. The flow of energy blending them together establishes an invisible toroidal field that further and deeper spreads beyond them in a larger balance affecting the whole background. The organic curves seemingly stemming out of the Flower of Life at the bottom─center of Dodecahedron─flow up like red blood, perceptibly permeating everything in the composition to infuse with pure vital force the carnal embrace and to keep up to the Venus Pentagram, to a cosmic level and incessantly back.

The elegant combination of motifs and objects allows for the interrelation between universal symbolic meanings and Handiedan's own personal experiences and private associations. Every geometrical shape carries a wealth of knowledge linked with eternal philosophical quests while the everyday objects interwoven between the paper layers and the hand-drawings guard Handiedan's private memories and personal feelings, whether within the label form a bottle of wine consumed with someone on a special occasion, a pen doodle of her character Amélie or the real tattoos drawn from the artist's own body.

Handiedan's dynamic constant shifting─from the universal to the individual, from the sensual to the spiritual, from earthling minute details to cosmic systems─holds harmoniously together differences and diversity in the sea of infinite energy that perpetuates the miracle of life.

Torus opens Saturday, November 2nd from 7:00pm-11:00pm in the Main Gallery and there will be a new print from Handiedan available to purchase. Plus, attendees will be able to interact with various works in the show that feature an augmented reality component. Premiering the same night at CHG is a solo show from Nicole Gordon in Gallery 2 and mini-solo shows from Miho Hirano and Nicoletta Ceccoli in Gallery 3.

The work of Dutch artist Handiedan involves a complex cut and paste mixture of digital and highly detailed sculptural hand cut collages, complimented by conscientiously collected antique ornamental frames. Handiedan’s accomplished and refined collage technique allows her for an artistic journey through past, present and future. The result is an almost kaleidoscopical visual exploration whose discoveries are sometimes immediately visible and sometimes hidden in plain sight. Deeply influenced by multi-sexual, scientific and spiritual interests - from Quantum Physics, Cosmology and Numerology to Sacred Geometries, Metaphysics and Eastern Philosophies - her art embraces the various forms of vital energy endlessly permeating the universe and mirrors the eternal motion of life. With a background in photographic design and illustration, Handiedan started working as a full-time artist in 2007. Ever since, her artwork has been shown in galleries throughout the world as well outside the gallery and as large-scale wheat paste installations.