Zoe Koke

Speed, gas, evaporation and disappearance are conceptualized as embodiments of Capitalism in Zoe Koke’s paintings. The materiality and disintegration of nature become the primary subject in her work, pointing to our divorced connection with our surroundings as well as our own bodies and senses. The distance between abstraction and figuration is a realm to examine power. In Koke’s work, the notion of a landscape isn’t fixed, rather it shifts, dissolves and recedes. Titles take their shape from simple observations as well as important cultural texts, markers for overlapping histories of omission, destruction and regeneration. She looks to the representation of nature in Art History, considering the notion of the Sublime, the Renaissance, Impressionism, Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and hobby art, to conceptually meditate on how depicting the landscape has long been a part of human ritual, domination and survival. Koke considers her work an envelope of alternatives for perception, intending to consider the physical as well as the metaphysical and cultural containers that shape our fraught relationship with our physical environment.