Canepa Selling is pleased to present In the Garden, a group exhibition showcasing paintings by four artists: William Maxen, Sam Rathbun, Rebecca Raue, and Allison Lu Wang. This collection of paintings pays homage to the enduring, mythic, metaphysical, and aesthetic lineages of gardens, in distinctively contemporary ways. While the garden’s allure has long been suffused with symbolic and historical weight, the works in this show expand our inherited associations further, across a range of more turbulent and enmeshed aesthetic and affective registers that reflect the crises and possibilities of our time. Guttering candles, golden drips, prismatic shards, shadow puppets, the worldwide net, real, remembered, imagined, dreamed—all bloom here. The attempt is not to escape the indeterminate world; rather, to find a way in. Raue’s metaphysical net in a field punctuated by pastel and primary colors, sketched figures, scribbles and elementary shapes, insists on the dynamic possibilities of a juvenile playfulness in the face of complexity. Wang’s jagged and violent, ectoplasmic profusions, evoke the dramatic shapes of moods that grip, shiver, and contort as they attempt resolution, experiences that are simultaneously constitutive and shattering. Rathbun’s uncanny scenes painted on wood panels and canvas push the two dimensional towards enmeshment and multiplicity: a snake weaves its own body in and out of what could be delicate branches, haphazard straw, new growth; a tree stump filled or carved, embedded or enchanted, carries a reflection of the sky; an expanse of flowers appears both traversable and impermeable, both field and wall. Maxen’s atmospheric, weather gardens obscure and reveal figures who seem ever in the midst of dissolution and emergence, as drips, condensations, and precipitations, like memory, affectively open moments in time. Across these four bodies of works, shipping focalizations between the concrete and the abstract create visual rhythms endemic to gardens forgoJen, lost, yet to come. In the Garden displays simultaneous profusion and stillness, a world as old as time, ever on the brink of being made anew. In the Garden is curated by Mortimer Canepa. For press inquiries, contact: info@canepaselling.com