Bouin Division is excited to present Lumière, Wanda Koop’s first exhibition in the city since her 2024 solo presentation at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Titled WHO OWNS THE MOON, Koop’s museum show opened just days after the Great North American Eclipse. As the path of totality arched over Montreal, it imbued her paintings of obscured moons and mystical portals with power and portent, giving the work an air of premonition. As she so often does, Koop found herself surrounded by pictures, long since completed, that felt beamed-in and new.
This spring, amid global conflicts and growing uncertainty around A.I., the space expedition Artemis II circled the moon, drawing it back into the public consciousness. For a brief news cycle, the world’s attention shifted outward, away from divisive politics and technological anxiety towards a more enlightened perspective. The crew snapped images of Earthset and captivated us with portraits of what our planet really is: a glistening disc of beautiful, improbable life.
Here, Koop’s paintings of red, green, and gold planets seem to foretell the Artemis voyage. They describe majestic levitations, swirls of ribbon-like atmosphere, and the cosmic equilibrium that governs our earthly lives. If her earlier paintings gazed moonward, these new works spacewalk. She has named them the Untethered series, and they spellbind with the weightlessness and immensity of planets in motion.
Equally planet-like, anchoring the show on its central wall, is a monumental painting of a red sun. It is a vast colour field, a round, raw nerve of seeing and feeling. Its insistent dot peers through the fog, supervising the show’s moons, half-closed eyes, and vigilant candles, symbols of watchfulness and quiet resistance.
Surrounding the eye is an orange-grey haze. This fog, as the title, Evacuate, intimates, is the smoke from forest fires that raged throughout the summer of 2025, displacing 33,000 people across Manitoba. Under smoking skies and with growing unease we shift from the intimacy of candlelight to the flick of a distant oil flare, and back again.
Like HAL, the mutinous A.I. in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Koop’s penetrating eye surveys and assesses. Are we watching it or being watched? Are we in the presence of a benign guardian or a dangerous new god? Koop has described her best paintings as having their own intelligence, and her new, light-themed work seems to see into the future, beyond current events and into the unknowable. With delicate candles, tree-knot eyes, and a wide-aperture daystars, Koop lets in the light.
