Running concurrently in Acquavella’s New York City and Palm Beach locations from April 21 through June 10, Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes is influenced by and based, in part, on curator Todd Bradway’s research for his 2019 book, Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism. The works on view in this exhibition present myriad conceptual and formal approaches for picturing the natural environment. By grouping them together, Bradway intends that they appear united in their highly stylized approach to depicting landscapes and how they utilize color, form, and perspective to represent our modern world.
Some paintings skew towards more traditional, perceptually driven (though often distorted) portrayals of our surroundings. Others exhibit a more abstracted, expressive flatness connected by their shared mediation with modern modes of perception such as photography, the iPhone, billboards, video games, and television. Their subjects are as diverse as the methods used to depict them, ranging from dreamlike forest scenes, moody nocturnals, and dramatic aerial views of the world to perspective-shifting cityscapes and hallucinatory yet melancholic views of the sea.
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With artists ranging in age from 35 to 95, Unnatural Nature considers the work of a new generation of artists alongside significant pieces by more established painters including Adrian Berg, Lois Dodd, David Hockney, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, and Wayne Thiebaud. For artists like Jennifer Coates and Daniel Heidkamp, an exploration of the history of art itself becomes a key subject of their canvases. Others focus on the emotional potential of painting and memory, as in Jon Joanis’s scenes using non-traditional materials such as coffee grounds and glow-in-the-dark paint, while Nicole Wittenberg’s canvases aim to welcome the viewer to seductive, swirling vistas.
Unnatural Nature — which consists of major new works brought to the gallery straight from the artists’s studios, as well as important loans from estates and private collections — intends to give viewers a deeper understanding of our place in the world while further reinforcing the ongoing potency of contemporary painting.
Artists displayed in the New York City exhibition include Henni Alftan, Hurvin Anderson, Gideon Appah, Jules de Balincourt, Hayley Barker, Adrian Berg, Jennifer Coates, Ann Craven, Lois Dodd, Maureen Gallace, Sky Glabush, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Daniel Heidkamp, David Hockney, Yvonne Jacquette, Jon Joanis, Yuka Kashihara, Alex Katz, Makiko Kudo, Patricia Leite, John McAllister, William Monk, Laurie Nye, Nicolas Party, Lisa Sanditz, Wayne Thiebaud, Nicole Wittenberg, and Matthew Wong.
For more information on both shows, visit acquavellagalleries.com.
Source: Hyperallergic.com