Looking for the desert by Damien Ding is featured in the group show “Natural World Part II” at Alexander Berggruen gallery in New York.

Dates: March 9-April 13, 2022

This group show, presented in two parts, explores how the natural environment and the flora of domestic settings have evolved in contemporary painting, drawing, and sculpture. Certain works explore more traditional depictions of landscape and plant life, while others verge on surrealist adaptations of our known world. Part I explored historical works over the last six decades to generate rich context for the contemporary works that will be shown in Part II. In this second iteration, contemporary artists expand the vocabulary of painting the natural world as they record their own histories, transform their memories of landscape into unreality resembling reality, utilize the digital tools and aesthetics at their fingertips, and project psychological interpretations onto land.

{…}

Landscapes may become emotional vessels in this exhibition, as felt in paintings by Greg Ito, Scott Kahn, Sanam Khatibi, Brittney Leeanne Williams, Damien H. Ding, Nicasio Fernandez, and Madeleine Bialke. Ito considers the landscape a “cerebral space” to communicate symbols and narratives. In Kahn’s 2021 Autumn Sunset, the artist repeats bulbous forms in the field, trees, and clouds in reference to persistent waves of emotion. Khatibi depicts nature to set the stage for her figures to explore primal impulses. As Williams interweaves the body and the landscape, “the Mojave desert, my grandmother’s garden, and the shoreline all become visual placeholders for spiritual, emotional, and psychological forces that take place within the body,” according to the artist. Similarly, the rolling desert hills in Ding’s Looking for the desert oscillate between appearing as sand dunes and a hand. In Bialke’s paintings, nature becomes personified as her curves become more pronounced, rounded, and fleshy. Fernandez approaches the natural world with “poetic absurdity that explores an emotional landscape,” resulting in a playful yet surreal reminder to consider nature’s gifts through the lens of a flower, moonlight, and personified tree.

United by their exploration of the natural world, the artists in this group show respond to the present moment by capturing the potential in the land that surrounds them or exists in their minds.