黑料不打烊

Night Gallery is pleased to announce False Spring, an exhibition of new paintings by Kemi 翱苍补产耻濒茅. This is the artist鈥檚 debut solo exhibition in the United States and follows her participation in the group show Shrubs, 2022.

Throughout her practice, 翱苍补产耻濒茅 is known for her humanoid figures who interact with her vivid, post-apocalyptic landscapes. While broadening her world-making environments, 翱苍补产耻濒茅 takes direct reference from her lived experience in painting bodies in shades of brown as she undermines Western landscape tropes. Where predecessors flattened and exoticized the 鈥淥ther,鈥� and created endless sightlines to suggest unbounded colonial domination, 翱苍补产耻濒茅 creates contained scenes that reflect the deep, psychic spaces of her figures.

翱苍补产耻濒茅鈥檚 title derives from a line in Ernest Hemingway鈥檚 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast: 鈥淲hen spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.鈥� This 鈥渇alse spring,鈥� and the winter weather that follows, mirrors the ups and downs of the writer鈥檚 life in interwar Paris. 翱苍补产耻濒茅鈥檚 鈥渇alse spring鈥� similarly references a summer that鈥檚 come too early, perhaps due to the climate crisis; our increasingly unstable seasons have warped our sense of promised time. The artist views such ecological vicissitudes through the prism of the body: She considers how it responds to shifting landscapes鈥攁nd may respond to the lush, regenerative climates that arise after the world we know disappears.

翱苍补产耻濒茅鈥檚 figures wade or gaze into eddying waters as volumes of green streaks and drips suggest the dynamic lands, grasses, and tropical settings around them. Lost Love and The Wish to Be Forgiven (both 2024) feature pairs of figures who reveal or conceal themselves in bright or twilit clearings. In the title painting, False Spring (2024), no figure appears. Instead, bare tree limbs arc across a desolate landscape that evokes the wreckage of California forest fires. In the distance, pastel waters reflect a luminous moon. Throughout these paintings, the artist considers what it means to have a witness, whether human or celestial.