Nature Painting Nature

Opening reception: Tuesday 23 July, 6–8pm

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Nature Painting Nature a group exhibition of works by Jordan Casteel, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Leiko Ikemura, Francesca Mollett, Sabine Moritz and Vivien Zhang. 

Guest curated by Lydia Yee, Nature Painting Nature takes a multigenerational look at artists for whom the forms of nature offer a way to translate personal experience, memory and direct observation into paint. It takes as a starting point Frank O’Hara’s essay, ‘Nature and New Painting’ (1954), focusing on a generation of New York School painters who filtered their experience through natural subject matter, in contrast to the transcendent approach of their Abstract Expressionist peers. ‘There is a kind of painting’, O’Hara writes, ‘which looks to be about nature but is lacking in perceptions of it. Here the painter utilises his visual experience for subject matter, but his experience is the subject, nature is not.’

The exhibition features work by Jane Freilicher and Grace Hartigan, both of whom are discussed in O’Hara’s essay. Freilicher’s paintings appear to be rooted in representation, notably in still life and landscape, but she aligns her concerns with ‘an inner impulse that wants to be expressed’. This approach of mixing abstraction and representational elements is shared by her second-generation Abstract Expressionist peer Hartigan, whose Tide Pool (1972) blends watercolour and collage, taking the shapes of gastropods, algae and other marine life, all intermingling between shards of blue.

In recent decades, artists have looked to nature to express personal and cultural narratives. Drawing on both Eastern and Western painting traditions, Leiko Ikemura’s trio of paintings Lake Biwa (2019–20) echo the natural cycle of life, drawing inspiration from a large freshwater lake near Kyoto, not far from where the artist was born. Sabine Moritz’s Deception Island (2015) depicts a wintery seascape with the mountainous backdrop of a volcanic island in Antarctica. Describing this tension between abstraction and landscape, Moritz has stated: ‘It’s like there are two banks, figuration on one side and abstraction on the other, and a river between. The river is obstinate. It takes time to cross.’ 

The recent turn toward landscape, still life and botanical subjects by a younger generation of artists signals a renewed interest in finding one’s place within the world, and by extension, painting. Francesca Mollett’s paintings distill observations, recorded in drawings and notes, of natural phenomena often encountered in urban environments, as in her painting, Nacre (2024). Jordan Casteel’s recent paintings are based on the seasonal blooms in her garden in the Catskill region in New York, where she has recently relocated from New York City. Three salmon pink blooms in Lupine (2024) – named for the mistaken belief that the flower ‘wolfs’ nutrients from the soil – emerge from the foreground against an abstract field of green that separates them from the flowering trees in the background. A highly personal subject, Casteel’s flowers can be viewed as self-portraits: ‘I see my own labor in it. It’s not about observing the things that are most true for you in this moment. It’s about observing the things that were most true for me.’ Vivien Zhang mixes painterly and graphic languages in a group of small paintings depicting the individual blooms and seeds of a tree native to southern China. The plant, sterculia lanceolata, has the prefix ‘pseudo-’ in its common name in Chinese, marking it out as inauthentic. This confusion around authenticity is, for Zhang, liberating. Likewise, Yee finds in this diverse group of contemporary painters a space of freedom between painterly form and landscape, self-expression and observation.