Regen Projects is pleased to announce Land and Sea, the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based painter Silke Otto-Knapp to be held at the gallery. Known for her crepuscular landscapes and figurative tableaux that engage with the history of painting, Otto-Knapp’s signature style employs subtle washes of watercolor, slowly built up and removed layer by layer on the surface of the canvas to create form. Each carefully constructed composition embodies distinct temporalities and moods evoked through a juxtaposition of flatness and luminosity achieved through painterly chroma and surface texture. Drawing inspiration from a myriad of sources and subject matter including historical figures, landscapes and seascapes, poetry, modern dance choreography, theatre design, and textiles, her work engages both abstraction and representation, simultaneously creating and erasing form on the picture plane. The exhibition presents six watercolor paintings that wrap around the walls of the gallery like a sweeping horizon line. Spaced apart from each other, and installed low on the wall, the paintings achieve a weighted physical presence, and depict a group of seascapes. In the center of the gallery, a configuration of freestanding walls display vertically oriented multi-paneled paintings scaled in relation to the human form. One tableau features numerous figures activating the pictorial plane in their engagements with geometric shapes. Another larger work portrays a sequence of dancers in different positions. Each composition shifts between alternating positive and negative figure-ground relationships, creating the illusion of movement.