Nocturnal: A Group Exhibition on the Creative Power of Night

Description

As creatives, everyone has their own time of inspiration: day, afternoon and night. For some artists, the night is a moment of silence and the optimum period of reflection and creation.

Organised and conceived by Los Angeles gallerist Matthew Brown, David Zwirner’s Nocturnal is a group exhibition that convenes 14 artists who work primarily at night. Across painting and sculpture, the show draws upon what legendary contemporary painter Joan Mitchell termed “electric light,” harnessing the visual and temporal state of darkness to generate works that feel charged and introspective.

For the artists featured in Nocturnal, the night is the only time to create. Painter Olivia van Kuiken, whose work “Blind Eye” was made after hours to escape the gaze of others and her own inner critic. Sculptor Heidi Lau presents a standing work that evokes emergent landscapes shaped by lunar cycles and tides, topped by a ceramic from her Moon Jar series that links terrestrial and celestial realms. Also working in sculpture, Kenji Ide finds in minimal light a portal to an imaginative world where shapes blur and boundaries dissolve. Ultimately, the exhibition traces the arc from dusk to dawn in all its romantic, eerie and peaceful guises.