NO. 9 CORK STREET
9 CORK STREET
LONDON, UK W1S 3LL
OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2023, 6 - 8 PM
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. The artist has shown in over 50 exhibitions internationally and Night Gallery is excited to bring her work to a new audience.
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. Smoke (2023), for example, presents a bright orange moon, apparently fantastical until considered against images of the Pacific Northwest coast during fire season.
Fluorescent hues and graphic brush strokes are trademarks for the artist. In Blood Moon (2022), the moon becomes a violently pink, perfectly shaded circle which hovers at unreal proportion to the horizon line. Yet these stylistic elements belie the artist’s intensive process—she applies many layers to her paintings to generate their heady atmospheres.
Koop’s acid tones echo the way we often see nature today: glowing from a screen. Her paintings transfer such virtual luminosity onto substantial, enduring objects. Her tree limbs resemble truncated cords or wires, while reflections or refractions evoke digital glitches. The artist’s longstanding interest in the relationship between technology and perception finds expression in Barcode Borealis (2023), where a series of white and blue rectangles protrude from a minimal, twilit landscape. The “barcode” offers viewers language that cannot be read, a consumerist code that appears where clouds and a celestial body should be.
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.
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.
Wanda Koop (b. 1951, Vancouver, Canada) has been painting for more than four decades. The National Gallery of Canada mounted a major survey of her work in 2011. The artist has exhibited across Canada and the U.S. as well as in Europe, Asia, and South America. In 2019, The Dallas Museum of Art presented Concentrations 61: Dreamline, Koop's first major solo museum exhibition in the United States. Koop has been the recipient of numerous awards, honorary doctorates, and Canadian medals of honor, including the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada, in 2006. Her life and work have been the subject of several documentary films. She lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada.