Private View | THURsday 28 May 2026 | 6-8 pm
“Amor finishes the cigarette, grabs the instrument, sighs and starts playing.
Beno gets up from the sofa, half champagne glass in hand, he tries to say something impossible to understand to Amor, he gets no answer so he sits in front of the piano, he moves some of the roses out of the way.
Trisa comes next to the piano, opposite to Amor, and cries loudly.
The stage stays like this for a while, everything goes in crescendo but slowly.”
- Excerpt from The future of love by Benito Ekmekdjian
General Assembly is pleased to present Every single person I loved, a solo exhibition by Benito Ekmekdjian. In this exhibition, we encounter a cast of love-weary characters assembled from myth and memory. Mothers, lovers, fools, and musicians inhabit theatrical landscapes somewhere between truth and fiction.
Combining tones of tragedy and comedy, Ekmekdjian approaches his subjects from the vantage point of a director's chair. Studying the greats of stage and screen such as John Cassavetes, Stanley Kubrick, and Robert Wilson, Ekmekdjian constructs atmospherically dense scenes where emotion is at the foreground.
Music lives in Ekmekdjian’s painting as much as the subjects. He says the works are the result of the music he plays reverberating off the walls. Musicians, instruments, and melodies are illustrated on the canvas, intermingled with his seductive fields of pastels. Ekmekdjian’s subtle use of colour brings a lightness of being in the face of chaotic emotion.
Though autobiographical, the paintings resist outright confession. For Ekmekdjian, both paintings and theatre are spaces for the audience to reflect their emotions onto; what they offer is a narrative and an outlet that allows one to react to and find solace within. The character dramas are tragic, funny, and relatable. The artist repeatedly casts himself as a horse; in Journey, he is blissfully naive, and in its companion piece, Felicita, the artist explores the eerie calm of stability after years of struggle.
Throughout the exhibition, love drifts between melodrama and sincerity. A violinist plays songs of yearning to himself, levitating to the music and surrounded by vivid hues of pink and purple. Elsewhere, figures are caught mid-scene, paused before they can end their performance.
