05/28/2024
Canepa Selling is pleased to present In the Garden, a group exhibition showcasing paintings by four artists: William Maxen, Sam Rathbun, Rebecca Raue, and Allison Lu Wang.
This collection of paintings pays homage to the enduring, mythic, metaphysical, and aesthetic
lineages of gardens, in distinctively contemporary ways. While the garden’s allure has long been
suffused with symbolic and historical weight, the works in this show expand our inherited
associations further, across a range of more turbulent and enmeshed aesthetic and affective
registers that reflect the crises and possibilities of our time. Guttering candles, golden drips, prismatic shards, shadow puppets, the worldwide net, real,
remembered, imagined, dreamed—all bloom here. The attempt is not to escape the indeterminate world; rather, to find a way in. Raue’s metaphysical net in a field punctuated by pastel and primary colors, sketched figures, scribbles and elementary shapes, insists on the dynamic possibilities of a juvenile playfulness in the face of complexity. Wang’s jagged and violent, ectoplasmic profusions, evoke the dramatic shapes of moods that grip, shiver, and
contort as they attempt resolution, experiences that are simultaneously constitutive and shattering. Rathbun’s uncanny scenes painted on wood panels push the two dimensional towards enmeshment and multiplicity: a snake weaves its own body in and out of what could be delicate branches, new haphazard straw, new growth; a tree stump filled or carved,
embedded or enchanted, carries a reflection of the sky; an expanse of flowers appears both
traversable and impermeable, both field and wall. Maxen’s atmospheric, weather gardens obscure and reveal figures who seem ever in the midst of dissolution and emergence, as drips, condensations, and precipitations, like memory, affectively open moments in time.
Across these four bodies of works, shifting focalizations between the concrete and the abstract
create visual rhythms endemic to gardens forgotten, lost, yet to come. In the Garden displays
simultaneous profusion and stillness, a world as old as time, ever on the brink of being made
anew.
In the Garden is curated by Mortimer Canepa.