WANDA KOOP
Magnetic Field
September 5 - November 1, 2025
Arsenal Contemporary NY, in collaboration with Night Gallery, Los Angeles, is pleased to announce Magnetic Field, a presentation of new paintings by Wanda Koop. The show, Koop’s first solo in New York since 2018, follows Night Gallery’s major historical presentation of Koop’s plywood paintings (1981-90) at Frieze New York 2025. The artist has shown in more than 60 exhibitions internationally.
Koop created her newest body of work in her summer studio at Riding Mountain, Manitoba, a few hours northwest of her long-time home in Winnipeg. The resulting, multi-layered landscapes and skyscapes take inspiration from Koop’s surroundings, which are both idyllic and fragile. Calligraphic reeds break through a tranquil pond in Reed - E, Reed - Gold, and Reed - XO (all 2024). The bright orange sun in Evacuate (2025) evokes the Manitoba fires that recently forced 20,000 residents to leave their homes.
Koop's newest paintings offer wry considerations of technological doomerism. She debuts her “AI Ghost Trees,” in which barren tree trunks form the suggestive letters “AI” as if nature itself were warning us of a conspiracy. In her newest moon paintings, Koop seems to be identifying earth’s satellite as the genesis for the circle-centricity of so much modern art. It floats in rippling skies suggesting the unseen electronic currents of a theremin. The artist recently began playing the instrument, which allows her to tap into the intuitive and otherworldly energies that also guide her mark-making.
Koop’s approach to technology embraces double-edged humor and a broader, longer view. It’s unsettling to see a signifier for artificial intelligence in tree trunks, to try to find linguistic configurations in pond reeds and electronic patterns in the night skies. Yet as technology increasingly consumes our daily lives, it becomes impossible to escape its shadow in even the most remote locales.
The exhibition title reflects the artist’s attitude towards technological progress in the face of environmental collapse. Magnetic Field refers to the north-pointing compass that the artist painted on her cabin floor in Riding Mountain. This act recalls Koop’s earliest paintings, made on plywood that the artist salvaged and traded for artworks before she could afford canvases and stretchers of her own. Painting gains meaning not via its technological utility, but for its very presence and persistence as a primordial object of communication. Koop feels out her direction with her own internal guide, creating luminous fields that exist outside of language—be it early script or large language models. Her canvases reconnect us with the mysteries of the natural universe, which will persist long after we and our gadgets are gone.