ANGELA LANE

I want these occurrences to be mostly believable, but I don’t let science or truth get in the way. I enjoy how the process of painting takes me on a journey and that these real and unreal phenomena have the freedom to be something else that can’t quite be pinned down. — Angela Lane

Angela Lane is a representational painter of diminutively scaled, robust landscapes, interpreted during moments of miraculous cosmic and celestial events. Drawing from historical accounts, folkloric tales, descriptions of apocalyptic imagery, as well as her own life and imagination, Lane’s landscapes are rooted in humanity’s innate fascination with the heavens. Her work finds a fruitful dialogue with art historical traditions that extend back centuries, from the allegorical landscapes of German Romanticism to Enlightenment era paintings and etchings that recorded astronomical discoveries within emergent fields of natural science. Void of reference to human impact, nary the remnants of a people left behind, Lane concentrates the focus on our own perceptions and interpretations of these luminescent mysteries; as viewers we are not represented in these scenes because we are witnesses to them, these visions, our own.

Lane’s hypnotic subjects vary between the real, the imagined, and the unexplainable. While some titles such as Diamond Dust or Autoluminescence name specific phenomena, acting as a sort of index of these rare mirages, others such as Transmission or Time Lapse function descriptively, evoking poetic impressions and essences. The specific choice of material and scale is as equally considered as the ephemerality of her delicate pictures: oil applied to birch plywood panels, floated in dark walnut artist frames at the scale of a postcard, asserting the primacy of their objecthood.

Looming vaporous rings, gleaming spectral halos, and bending arcs of light capture the drama and spectacular mystery of nature. Lane grounds the works with a compact potency, the solidness of earth, the anchoring weight of gravity—snow capped mountains, fecund marshes, and expansive verdant hills. One might feel the measured passage of time in the vast and open quiet pictured here. Observing a glint of moonlight on the pond or a gust of wind rustling the leaves assures you are awake. Then something happens, something that can’t exist, something requires you to suspend your understanding of order in the universe, to question that it could exist, to permit yourself this openness is electric.

Angela Lane (b. 1974, United Kingdom) made her American debut in 2022 with a solo exhibition Beside the Sun at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA. Phosphene, her first solo exhibition in a public institution took place in 2023 at City Gallery Wellington in the capital of Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has been included in group exhibitions since then at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Meyer Riegger, Berlin, Germany; and Cob Gallery, London, UK. Lane lives and works in Raumati, New Zealand.