White Cube is pleased to present 'City', an off-site presentation at West Palm Beach. The exhibition considers how artists explore, reflect on and respond to the urban environment, using the city as both physical space and abstract concept. 'City' traces concerns and themes brought to the fore during the pandemic, including: the structure and flow of our urban environment; the dispersal of communities; the poetics of real and imaginary encounters; and the city of the future and its link to the past traced through the architectural ruin.

Imaginary structures and spaces are the subject of Al Held's monumental late abstract paintings and imaginary cityscapes are the setting for Minoru Nomata's lexicon of architectural forms. Held's later paintings featuring overlapping structures within a quasi-hallucinatory, three-dimensional space, reveal the artist's interest in chaos theory, and the increasingly complex and paradoxical nature of the modern world. By contrast, Nomata's forms are set within an empty landscape or shallow, theatrical space and rendered in a neutral palette that emphasises a lack of human presence. Drawing on his childhood experiences growing up in an industrial area of central Tokyo, Nomata responds to the isolation and transient nature of these environments, with its cycle of demolition and construction.

Liu Wei is part of a generation of artists in China who grew up with rapidly accelerating urbanisation and for him, the city is a constant point of reference. Recognising its potential as a dynamic and vital force, in his conceptual practice Liu questions how we plan, build and experience our cities. Combining a logical, systematic approach with an imaginative abandon, his abstract paintings, originating in digital images and produced in series, suggest a city skyline seen through a colourful haze of vertical lines.

Jeff Wall and Christian Marclay capture images of daily life within the frenetic urban environment, its iconography and continual human movement. Wall's Intersection (2008) records a patch of grass and sprouting weeds bordered by concrete – a corner of nature untamed within an otherwise densely built-up urban space – and two men, lost in thought, casually strolling by. Marclay's series of photographic snapshots, taken in various urban locations, reflect an interest in sound mimesis, whereby the signage of the city evokes noise through image: a violin case in a London music store, a guitar on a stall in Los Angeles or a keyboard running across a shop entrance in Vienna.

The material traces of the city appear in Virginia Overton's poised and minimal sculpture as well as in Theaster Gates's 'Civil Tapestry' series. Gates's work, A Study in Red (2021), uses a de-commissioned fire hose to create a colour field work that connects a history of Black oppression, through its reference to the 1963 Alabama civil rights battles where police turned fire hoses on the demonstrators, with the predominantly White history of abstraction.

Press release courtesy White Cube.