GROUP EXHIBITION

The exhibition presents an enigmatic sense of nature, branching out and digging deeper with artworks by Gerhard Richter, Ai WeiWei, Daniel Arsham, Nicholas Hughes, Dean Fox, and Sara Odman–all of whom observe the wild as a reflection of disparate artistic, philosophical, and technological paradigms.

Daniel Arsham‘s future relics series expands upon his ongoing exploration of transience, impermanence, and decay in an imagined future civilisation facing significant ecological changes. Ai Weiwei’s sculpture is a continuation of a series of works representing trees and their roots, with an interest in the environment and his particular concerns regarding deforestation in the Amazon.

Nicholas Hughes’ photography represents the precious and fragile nature of the British landscape. His work depends on a sense of transience, a walk into the unknown, allied to an environmental sensibility. Each of his photographs illustrates the furtive residue of the contemporary wilderness through reduced visions of the sublime within localised nature. Hughes examines the space between the world people inhabit and what nature still claims as its own.

With dense with striated textures, streaks and layers of colour, Gerhard Richter’s abstraction takes inspiration from the wild, sublime scenes of the world. His compositions reconcile a process that swings between pure chance and control. As he says, ‘all that I am trying to do in each picture is bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom.’

New paintings by Dean Fox reveal a frisson between the gestural expression of the human spirit and the mark one makes upon our often muted and tranquil terrain. According to Fox, the interplay between objectivity and abstraction is constant, for ‘nature embodies both these qualities and only one particular way of expressing yourself seems limited.’ His paintings persuasively affect how we encounter ourselves in the wild. Often painted from memory, Sara Odman’s bold and exuberant works depict the expansive forests, endless ocean, and wildflowers of the Norse environment.

Re: Wild is an exhibition that explores our current climate–birth and decay, transience and endurance; it asks us to relinquish our destructive desire for control over the natural world for both people and environments.