For Frieze Week 2025, Chilli are excited to present Beast of Burden, an ambitious two-part presentation of works by Rebekka Homann. Spread across the gallery space and a moving horse trailer near Regent’s Park and Mayfair, the show explores the story of 2 horses – touching on themes of care, attachment and loss.
Working across sculpture and digital media, Homann’s ambitious presentation focusses on a pair of horses the artist cared for from childhood into early adulthood. Handmade vehicles gently elevate and protect the memories of these cherished animals, embodying the quiet strength of carrying what we cannot let go. Painstakingly recreated and reanimated, the horses become physical beings in their own isolated digital worlds. Echoing the tradition of the equestrian pas de deux, where two horses
perform dressage movements in mirrored precision, their reappearance here suggests a carefully choreographed duet of memory – suspended between life and afterlife, freedom and containment. In doing so, Homann’s work functions as a form of eternal care; through conservation she attempts to make contact with those special memories. Equally preserved and trapped in these digital worlds, the horse trailer itself also becomes a vehicle for this paradox of care – at once containing the horses, but also protecting and resting them.
In the horse trailer, we encounter a sculpture reminiscent of an engine hoist crane – a machine more commonly found in a garage or workshop. Homann’s digitally preserved horse is suspended, slightly lifted yet restrained within a meticulously constructed wooden box. The crane’s sculptural form itself echoes the memory of a creature burdened by effort, its frame bent under an unseen weight, recalling the endurance of working horses. This duality of labour – caring for these animals, while also putting
them to work – reveals the complex entanglement of service, dependence and devotion. Awkwardly contorted and confined within the trailer, the work has a subdued sentience to it, and a tension lingering in the space between reverence and restraint.
Within the monitor itself we see a white horse resting, perpetually suspended in time at the threshold of its own ending. By decelerating time, Homann compels us to confront questions of attachment, memory, and the very nature of ageing itself. As likenesses of her own horses, these works carry a palpable sense of longing and a warming nostalgia. Suffused with a quiet intimacy, they transform into more than mere portraits, becoming moving emotional forces – tender meditations on the bonds
we form and the inevitability of passing.
Back at the gallery, we find it’s companion – another monitor quietly nestled in the corner of the room like a sleeping animal. The footprint of the room hints at the idea of a stable, echoing the ethos of the nomadic element of the presentation. Alongside it rests a wooden form that recalls the structure of a yoke – a crosspiece traditionally fastened over the necks of two animals and attached to the plough or cart they are made to pull. Unlike its historic models, it’s been made to fit two animals of differing sizes, directly referencing the proportions of the two horses in Homann’s work. Were it ever put to use, the weight would be spread unevenly across their backs, one animal forced to bear more than the other. In doing so, this yoke becomes a symbol of imbalance and endurance, revealing the quiet inequities embedded within acts of shared labour.
Rebekka Homan Beast of Burden open by appointment at CHILLI
Private view on the 13th 6PM-8PM
*The Horse trailer will be on the move 16th October near Frieze and Mayfair – Updates @chilli_gallery
About the artist
Rebekka Homann (b. 1999, Hamburg) lives and works between London, UK and Berlin, DE. She graduated with her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2025, having studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Art and the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles previously. Recent shows include ‘Not A House But A Memory’ at rosenfeld, London (group) and ‘Every Separation Is A Link’ at Kunsthalle.ost, Leipzig (duo).
