Romancing Relevance–Group Exhibition Curated by Kevin Poon in Hong Kong

WOAW Gallery is pleased to present Romancing Relevance, a thematic group exhibition curated by Kevin Poon, celebrating an unfettered exploration of imagination, featuring works by Brian Calvin, Jake Clark, Sean Gannon, Evgen Čopi Gorišek, Baldur Hegalson, Monika Karandi, Laure Mary-Couégnias, Zoe McGuire, Keita Morimoto, Charlie Roberts, and Trude Viken. The exhibition is on view from March 31 to April 14, in 9 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong.

It is said that desire populates the space between artists and their work. Fixated on a subject — a memory, a taste, a sensation — the artist transforms raw material into objects of the world. In other words, this desire catalyses artists to continually experiment and transgress the boundaries set up by their predecessors. In pursuit of the sublime, the writers and artists of Romanticism, the literary and artistic movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th Century, expanded upon notions of myth-making, landscape, nature, and the melancholia.

A nod to the Romantics, Romancing Relevance brings together a group of artists who share an obsession with paint and its possibilities. By challenging the bounds of their imagination, the artists court the contemporary as a site of transfiguration and transformation, offering up new possibilities for the painterly surface.

Traversing the land of dreams and mountains, Zoe McGuire, Monika Karandi, and Laure Mary-Couégnias transform paint into mysticism and fables. Preoccupied with contorting memory and representation, Trude Viken and Brian Calvin deform and reform themselves through self-portraiture. Meanwhile, Evgen Čopi Gorišek and Baldur Hegalson disfigure bodies and faces, rendering them into mutable containers of the psyche. A reflection on consumer culture and its contents, the works of Sean Gannon and Jake Clark open up a light-hearted space of reflection. Citing the Dutch Golden Age and perspective painting, respectively, Keita Morimoto and Charlie Roberts offer enigmatic snippets that capture the interiority of the contemporary.