The Last Seahorse Neighing in an Egg
July 30th, 2025 - September 12th, 2025
Faye Wei Wei & Erin Wolf Mommsen
July 30th, 2025 - September 12th, 2025
Faye Wei Wei & Erin Wolf Mommsen
Ninetto presents The Last Seahorse Neighing in an Egg, a summer exhibition showcasing individual and collaborative works by Faye Wei Wei and Erin Wolf Mommsen, created during their July residency at the gallery. The exhibition traces the interplay between painting and poetry, capturing intimate gestures, fleeting moments, and imaginative rituals that unfold across memory and desire. Through these works, the artists explore the fragile, ephemeral nature of experience.
A book gathering their collaborative poems and drawings is available as a limited, signed edition of 100 copies.
This is how the paintings and poems were conjured.
On the flowerbed of chance
Desire and delirium
For the permanent
The everlasting
We looked at the moon and couldn’t see the stars but felt them— We sat in the parks, cafes, trains to Coney Island, pubs, and beds
of New York City—in black velvet Guinness night love was made
manifest through spun poems, songs and paintings in silver threads.
Faye carried a chocolate box of watercolours, Erin—a tin pencil
case of charcoal ephemera. A leather bound purple book held plum
coloured ink which brought forth a blooming of poem games.
Line after line, in turn—in tune. We told each other fairytales,
“Once Upon a Time”
…
And the world became a fairytale collapsed within the paintings.
Star after star.
Real life, and real painting became cyclically linked.
Like the cosmic snake that breathes in the sky.
Like the beauty and sweetness of doughnuts at night time.
Imagination sustained in the hyacinth garden—in the face of
impermanence.
All the world still and quiet, cocooned by a sleepy spider’s web.
Two flowers dedicated to the pursuit of beauty.
A book gathering their collaborative poems and drawings is available as a limited, signed edition of 100 copies.
This is how the paintings and poems were conjured.
On the flowerbed of chance
Desire and delirium
For the permanent
The everlasting
We looked at the moon and couldn’t see the stars but felt them— We sat in the parks, cafes, trains to Coney Island, pubs, and beds
of New York City—in black velvet Guinness night love was made
manifest through spun poems, songs and paintings in silver threads.
Faye carried a chocolate box of watercolours, Erin—a tin pencil
case of charcoal ephemera. A leather bound purple book held plum
coloured ink which brought forth a blooming of poem games.
Line after line, in turn—in tune. We told each other fairytales,
“Once Upon a Time”
…
And the world became a fairytale collapsed within the paintings.
Star after star.
Real life, and real painting became cyclically linked.
Like the cosmic snake that breathes in the sky.
Like the beauty and sweetness of doughnuts at night time.
Imagination sustained in the hyacinth garden—in the face of
impermanence.
All the world still and quiet, cocooned by a sleepy spider’s web.
Two flowers dedicated to the pursuit of beauty.
Faye Wei Wei
(—b. 1994, London, United Kingdom)
Faye Wei Wei is currently attending the MA in Fine Arts of Yale (USA) after she graduated from the Slade (London, UK) in 2016. Faye Wei Wei conceives of the painting process as an intimate choreography between actual and pictorial space. Revolving around spiritual iconography and classical myth, love rituals and the theatricality of gender, her works address the themes of particular mythic narratives and at other moments depart into a more ambiguous, interior space of incongruity and uncertainty.
Erin Wolf Mommsen
(—b. 1996, Santo Domingo, Domican Republic)
Erin Mommsen treads the world with an uncanny ease. A self-taught painter and draftsman based in New York, his work emerges from a deeply felt connection to transience—of places, of moods, of memory. His oil paintings and drawings evoke a dreamlike state where time stretches and contracts, where forms hover at the edge of recognition. They carry a lingering, fleeting sense of melancholy and nostalgia—like moments that feel uncannily familiar, as if drawn from memories we never had. Beneath their quiet sophistication, a childlike naïveté emerges, a raw openness that invites us to see the world as if for the first time. Moving in and out of small, concentrated bodies of work, Mommsen explores the fragile quality of presence, using painting as a meditation on being. There is an old soul in his sensibility, a quiet resistance to the velocity and sensitivities of modern times. To him, art is not a fixed act but a process of becoming—of thought gathering matter, of stillness turning into resonance. It is a pursuit of transcendence, where image and emotion coalesce in their own measured logic.