March 7 – April 11 2026
This exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery brings together two bodies of work—a film and a photographic series—both rooted in Charlotte Dumas’s relationship with her father, the painter Peter Dumas. It also marks the premiere of the film The Brush in Your Hand. Together, the works explore creativity as a way of attention and care, and consider how ways of seeing, making, and remembering are passed on across generations.
The Brush in Your Hand is an intimate portrait of Peter Dumas and his youngest granddaughter, Ivy. Trained as a graphic artist, Peter became known for his highly precise watercolor paintings of building facades, works that required intense concentration. Quiet and introverted, he preferred to remain an observer. In the film, he is encountered through his paintings and fragments from his diaries, while Ivy builds a cardboard house for her toy mice—an intuitive, tactile act of making that echoes her grandfather’s tenacity in another form. As their worlds intersect, past and present are gently woven together, and Dumas’s own role as both daughter and mother gradually comes into focus. The film reflects on creativity as something deeply idiosyncratic, transcending generations and finding different forms.
Entendue, the photographic body of work on view, originates in a lifelong practice of looking shared between father and daughter. As a child, Dumas visited the Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam with her father, where they sketched elephants together. Observing animals with patience and precision became foundational to her artistic approach. Near the end of his life, when Peter was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, they returned to the elephants one last time. His drawings from this visit are tentative and abstracted, the animals presence being more felt than depicted.
Following his death, Dumas revisited the elephants alone, carrying her father’s half-frame Olympus Pen-F camera. She became attached to the small negatives—half of a 35 mm frame—which often framed only fragments of the animals, too large to be held in a single image. The grain of the film, in relation to the skin of the elephants transforms the images into something else, lingering between photographic image and graphite drawing. Together with her father’s elephant drawings, these images were published in a book titled Entendue, meaning “heard” or “understood.”
Seen together, the film and photographic works are a meditation on family bonds, from both human and animal perspectives. The exhibition offers a space of closeness: between father and daughter, grandparent and child, human and animal, reflecting on attention, responsibility, and the enduring traces of creative life.
