2020 | WANDA KOOP
BREAKING NEWS
TORONTO - PATEL DIVISION PROJECTS
Feb 7 - Avr 18

BREAKING NEWS

Feb 7 - Mar 21, 2020

Opening: Feb 6, 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.

Many of the world events addressed in Wanda Koop’s recent BREAKING NEWS paintings still resonate in our current news cycle: Australian bushfires rage, North Korean missile tests persist. With the world on high alert and the environment in peril, Koop’s paintings metabolize and order these events with the same measured omniscience that has marked her entire career. 

On the heels of a solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, BREAKING NEWS synthesizes several eras of Koop’s painting. The result is wide-ranging but succinct. On the one hand, she has developed new gestures and technological lenses through which to frame the world; on the other, certain painted symbols – fire on a shoreline, chyrons on a television screen, pendulous teardrops – evoke decades’ worth of past work. This series need only quote her earlier Iraq War-themed GREEN ZONE paintings or - amid contested shipping lanes and riparian water rights - nod to her SEEWAY work, to suggest an unsettling through line in geopolitics.

Ultimately, these unwavering aspects of her painting, the recurring themes and insistent formal elements, act as ballast to the current tenor of global affairs. Economical brushwork, assertive colour and equanimous compositions offer the clarity of sane, sober thought. A painter when painting was unfashionable, a woman when female artists were overlooked, Koop arrives in the current moment sounding a clarion call more urgent and audible than ever.