Polina Berlin Gallery presents It’s complicated to be sincere, a three-person exhibition of recent paintings by Hanae Moreno-Niimi, Sof’ya Shpurova, and Marika Thunder, on view from January 30 through March 8, 2025.

Second Inaugural 

Like her constant need of being born peeling back the scalp like there’s something else to sing oneself out of oneself and verify, elaborate, choke on it, the sweetness frosting, warmer than expected, still purring, your palms are sticky though you ate hours ago.  

Right in the throat and on the palms rug burn, DayQuil, grandmother’s black hole, the black sun and the energy. It’s not a leaf the robot, it’s not a robot the compass, sharp point it spins around to make a perfect circle. You don’t come twice, so tangled a mess in the nest so easy so and ironic if you don’t know what distance is. I don’t get shit, I’m old, belligerent, unforgivable you still alive you’re an empty cigarette filter in stubby fingers, hollow, wickless, all flame fist-sized in the sun and then nothing; butt of palm. Eat so much poison to inoculate against the poison if you do it at home you’re being homeopathic about it, radioactive, radiant with bored love quiver full of arrows of waiting for it to dry, guys in hazmat suits being careful putting their hands back to die. You simply cannot throw your arms open the room is too small. 

To accept war is in the end the same as making it, a sterile act sterilized by big brute force to ceaseless clicking, the interface another banquet scene so we hear them together before they are pulled apart. The act braces to enter the social, its red and forgetting cool and flake away to begin the accounting; in the hierarchy of scale the servants have small wings. 

A pamphlet about aliveness, laminated stacks of them with typos lit on fire to keep warm and running still when the surface is the only place right and left for this once coming 

Dana DeGiulio

on Hanae Moreno-Niimi, Sof’ya Shpurova, and Marika Thunder

January 2025 

Hanae Moreno-Niimi (b. 1994, Nagoya, Japan) lives and works in Berlin, Germany, Lisbon, Portugal and Geneva, Switzerland. She earned her MFA in 2024 at Transart Institute for Creative Research, Liverpool and a Graduate Certificate in 2020 from the University of Geneva. Moreno-Niimi’s work has been exhibited at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, Liverpool John Moore University, Liverpool, Cabin Berlin, Berlin, Usdan Gallery, and Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont.

Sof’ya Shpurova (b. 1996, Moscow, Russia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her MFA in 2024 at Columbia University and her BFA in 2019 from The Slade School of Art, University College London. Shpurova’s work has been exhibited at Lubov, New York (forthcoming), Szena Gallery, Moscow, Holden Gallery, Manchester School of Art, Manchester, CABIN, New York, C L E A R I N G,  New York, and Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, New York, among others. 

Marika Thunder (b. 1998, New York, New York) lives and works in New York, New York. She attended Hunter College. Thunder’s work has been exhibited at Fredericks & Freiser, New York, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles, Micki Meng, New York, National Arts Club, New York, Nina Johnson, Miami, David Lewis, New York, and 56 Henry, New York, among others.