ETHEREAL

ETHEREAL (GROUP SHOW)

EDJI is pleased to present its spring group exhibition, showcasing eight young emerging artists whose work reinterprets the sublime in contemporary painting.

Preview : 19.03.2025, 6 – 9pm

Painting has long explored the interplay between reality and the sublime. The 19th-century landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church and the Hudson River School presented nature as something vast, luminous, and almost untouchable. Meanwhile, Odilon Redon and the Symbolists approached the ethereal through a different lens, dissolving form into atmosphere and using colour and texture to evoke an interior world of dreams and mysticism. Whether through the precision of Romantic landscape or the abstraction of Symbolist figuration, these artists sought to capture what lies beyond the visible.

This impulse continues in contemporary painting but has taken on new forms. Over the past decade, a growing number of figurative painters have turned away from the hyperrealism that once dominated the field. Instead, they embrace stylization, simplified compositions, and gradients of colour that reject rigid perspective in favour of something softer, more fluid. This shift reflects a broader response to a world saturated with digital imagery. With photography, social media, and AI-generated visuals now dictating much of our visual culture, painters have moved toward a different kind of image-making, one that prioritizes mood over exactitude, suggestion over definition.

This exhibition brings together eight contemporary painters whose work taps into this lineage. Through landscape, still life, and figuration, they explore the tension between reality and dream. Using oil, acrylic, or oil stick, their surfaces resist precision, embracing the atmospheric qualities of light and texture.

Rather than depicting the ethereal through overt symbolism or narrative, these paintings let atmosphere and composition do the work. The soft transitions of colour, the quiet distortion of form, the way light dissolves edges—each decision pulls the image away from the literal and into something more elusive. Whether through nature’s hazy glow, the abstraction of space, or the suggestion of figures fading into their surroundings, the works in Ethereal speak to a desire for slowness and reflection in an era of visual overload.

Like their predecessors, these artists are not simply capturing the world as it appears but reshaping it, offering a painterly response to an increasingly disembodied visual culture.

Artists : Adam Lupton, Arthur Grucela, Emma Steinkraus, Harriet Gillett, Heather Drayzen, Mark Hernandez, Ping Zheng, Yunchun Wang.