WOAW Gallery is pleased to present Contemporary Curated: Landscape a group show featuring 10 contemporary artists based between the UK and USA, curated by London-based gallerist and art dealer Taymour Grahne. The focus of this group exhibition is on the natural world, and how artists today are exploring nature and the landscape, and all that it stands for, through a contemporary lens.
The artists featured in the show include several who are debuting in Hong Kong for the first time. The full list of participating artists includes: Asif Hoque, Eliot Greenwald, Evie O’Connor, Hilary Doyle, Matthew F Fisher, Minyoung Kim, Nadia Ayari, Shaun Ellison, Stipan Tadić and Tessa Perutz.
Asif Hoque (Brooklyn, NY) is known for his exploration and celebration of Brown bodies through epic mythological scenes, in which angelic figures and ancient beasts erupt from raw linen canvas and swirling clouds to claim space and reverence. As a Bangladeshi immigrant raised between Rome and South Florida, Hoque draws on his own experience to figuratively and stylistically merge aspects of multicultural identity within his painting practice.
Eliot Greenwald (Ashfield, MA) explores the iconography of the Night Car – a theme that appears throughout his body of work like a personal mythology, where a driverless car moves through scifi landscapes, picking up passengers under the gaze of two identical planets painted in bold reds, blues and yellows. Inverted colour gradients and dreamy compositions connect the sky to the earth, and are traversed by the image of a road breaking through the horizon or background, morphing into a star filled night sky.
Evie O’Connor (London) examines, critiques and ponders the confusing climate we find ourselves in. Her work asks personal and uncomfortable questions about the breeding ground of excess, that we all play a part in creating. It invites conversation surrounding class, which for her is necessary and long overdue, and dissects the often empty aspiration of the scenes she envisions. Performative affluence and sun-kissed elitism become galleries in themselves, creating vignettes of beautiful privilege that are both repulsive and idyllic in our world of pain, poverty and pandemics.
Hilary Doyle (Worcester, MA) is an American artist whose work revolves around themes of womanhood, motherhood, psychology and everyday life. In her recent work, Doyle explores public urban parks seen as a contemporary Garden of Eden, or a stage for questioning gender roles, mythologies and how they have shaped our world.
Matthew F Fisher (NYC) is an artist who work revolves around aspects of the natural world that always seem to point towards the infinite. An ode to the greatness of space and nature, frequent protagonists of his compositions are frozen waves, statuesque sea shells and crustaceans, monolithic rock formations, soaring gulls, radiating suns, and orbiting planets.
Minyoung Kim (London) is intrigued by Phenomenology, the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Rather than approaching Phenomenology from a scientific advantage, or in the form of written commentary, Kim is inclined to pick up a paintbrush and paint - creating mirrors to some of her inner-most feelings. From works past to present, each contains poignant memories and expressions of anxiety, regret, desire and dreams - the very things we are not able to articulate directly through language.
Nadia Ayari (Brooklyn, NY) makes paintings that straddle abstraction and figuration. With a set of stylized protagonists borrowed from the flora of her native North Africa, the compositions often negotiate personal and political views. In her most recent works, Ayari introduces the Flower, a motif where forty-eight different tones of pink are carefully combined using a wet-on-wet painting technique.
Shaun Ellison (Brooklyn, NY), an enthusiastic tennis player himself, is inspired by the tennis world and the Grand Slams. His colourful compositions focus on the tension of the moment, the ascension of victory and the tragedy of defeat, famous players such as Nadal and Medvedev, as well as lesser-known tennis figures, and the loneliness and crushing weight professionals of the sector can feel at times.
Stipan Tadić (NYC) documents his everyday life in New York City and explores feelings of isolation and loneliness usually related to big city life. He frequently paints cityscapes using different perspectives to narrate multiple stories in one image and all locations featured in his works come from his daily routine. Classic NYC sceneries are seen mixed with symbols, letters, and ideas about his homeland Croatia and the artist’s own personal history.
Tessa Perutz (Brussels and NYC) creates colourful, exuberant landscapes paintings in which she explores the dialogue between nature and the human experience of it. Though abstracted, her fragmented Fauvist forms slot together into harmonious compositions that sing with light and life. By reducing representation to its essence and drawing attention the beautifully balanced proportions within natural form, a sense of tranquillity is achieved.
