Night Gallery is pleased to present Eclipse, an exhibition of new paintings by Wanda Koop. This will be the artist’s first solo show in London and will highlight motifs which have recurred throughout her storied, more than four-decade-long career.
Koop makes uncanny paintings that reinvigorate landscape traditions with bold, surreal interventions. Often inspired by her dreams, the compositions rely on mood and the unconscious to explore very real, contemporary ecological concerns. As the artist transforms natural features such as branches, beaches, and an eclipse into neon icons, she laments the degradation of the environment.
While the artist is interested in the post-human condition, her vision is less dire than it is melancholic and imbued with a mysterious sense of loss. Koop approaches her work with imagination and verve, suggesting the vibrancy of the world we’ll leave behind. Her paintings implore us, before we’re gone, to take a closer look.
Koop has lived in Winnipeg for most of her life and she is an ardent traveler and photographer. She documents views from plane windows, dirty snowbanks, and power lines in front of rushing water. These images find their abstracted corollaries in her paintings, which similarly integrate the majesty of nature with evidence of human interference.
