"Happy at the Wrong Time" by Soren Hope is a dynamic interplay of warm and cool tones, with swirling shapes that create a sense of movement and tension. The composition suggests fragmented human forms in an abstract environment, where faces and limbs appear in various stages of emergence and dissolution. The painting employs an expressive, fluid style, utilizing techniques like pooling paint and blurred marks to challenge visual coherency. This work reflects Hope's exploration of the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, inviting viewers into a space of ambiguity and contemplation. ...
Soren Hope’s work explores the unstable boundary between figuration and abstraction. Through painting and printmaking, they use substitutions and mirrored forms - an arm standing in for another, a face completing itself through reflection - to probe the limits of recognition and embodiment. Material gestures like pooling paint and eroded marks resist seamless illusion, creating images that hover between coherence and collapse. Across media, Hope’s practice sustains this tension, holding viewers in the space where meaning flickers and form comes undone. ...
New York Life Gallery centers collaborative curations with artists across all mediums. The gallery exhibits emerging and mid-career artists as well as unknown archives and 20th-century artworks. As an artist-run space, the gallery focuses on programming that is community-oriented.