Unnatural History presents new paintings by Sarah Kogan and is the inaugural exhibition at Rowland Gallery in Soho, London.
The exhibition references the colonial gaze epitomised in British culture from the 19th century and is influenced by literary and anecdotal true-life accounts of the natural world that were the mainstay of Sarah Kogan's youth. These narratives were almost as strange to her as the tales of her family's journey from Eastern Europe, one hundred years ago.
The paintings in the exhibition revisit familiar themes, which have emerged in different ways over time - the earliest work, What Remains, was painted in 2014. A primeval landscape is revealed as a miasmatic form captured for a moment and rendered by the use of dripping paint, which is then drained away from the surface of the canvas. Pouring paint has a particular resonance for Sarah and her ephemeral notions of mortality and temporariness and is a technically challenging process. It relies upon a precise understanding of how gravity, time, and temperature influence the materials and how they are to be deployed. A successful painting is partly defined by the creation of a sense of jeopardy and the paint is moved, and flows, until the decision is made to let it finally rest.
Another painting, Panguana, 2024, has its title taken from a scientific research station in Peru founded by German zoologists Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke whose 12-year-old daughter, Juliane, was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazonian rainforest in the 1970's. Her story was serialised in the Observer colour supplement in '72 and the accompanying series of photographs had a profound effect on Sarah's notion of landscape and her place within it - aerial photographs of the Amazon being particularly memorable. Juliane's remarkable journey through the rainforest, having lost her mother in the crash, made tangible the images in the magazine and are just as vivid to Sarah today as when she first saw them.
In addition to the narrative content, a continuing theme of the paintings is differing versions of movement or stillness within a landscape, whether through the tracking of paint or more static motifs suspended in the middle of flat planes on gessoed panels such as Night Shade I and II. This continues with the paintings Whiplash I and II, which evoke a momentary backward glance at twilight or debris abandoned on the side of a road. There is a sense of the images flapping into view from the subconscious- a neurological film snippet.
Somewhere between the image on the tablet of memory and the making of the work, lies Sarah's very own imaginary world of unnatural history and deadly nature, littered, like the deck of the fateful ship Ipecacuanha.
The gallery is open Wed-Sat, 11am-5pm.
