Wanda Koop

“Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse.”
—Victor Hugo

Whether by accident or design, the opening of Wanda Koop’s exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts coincided with the solar eclipse of April 8 in Montreal: a rare event where totality was visible for some minutes in the city. The period transforms the familiar but unobservable sun into a glistening silver crystal halo surrounding a blackened circle: a suddenly visible icon heralding a transformation of the surrounding environment, embodying both a singular monumentality and a moment of psychic conveyance.

Many of Koop’s large-scale paintings demonstrate a similar sort of transportive monumentality, except in the very human medium of paint.

“WHO OWNS THE MOON” is an installation of Koop’s recent large and medium-scale paintings, and is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a Quebec museum. The viewer is confronted upon entrance by four large-scale paintings that take up half of the cavernous exhibition space. The 2023 suite of works are each titled Black Sea Portal and subtitled according to individual colour.

The background of each work is the same minimally denoted seascape, in different light, viewing the expanse of the Black Sea from the Crimean coast. Much of the exhibition is a partial response to the current war in Ukraine, with Koop having family roots there. A large, off-centre, vertical rectangle of colour stands as a monolith—or a sort of stele, communicating a resonance throughout the piece: Luminous Yellow, Luminous Silver, Luminous Red, Sunset Orange. They function as a portal, transforming and anchoring the composition. The minimalist landscape Koop is known for creates a space that breathes and resonates with the lightest of applications: thin, expansive washes that stand in for cirrostratus cloud cover, distant land forms that are more passing painterly notations than depictions. The motif conjures up a sense of immense space, which seems in line with the expansive prairie landscape where Koop makes her home.

It is worth noting that Koop paints much of these large-scale canvases on the floor: the garage door in her studio is rigged to both hold the work upright for viewing and also to glide it to the floor, where it’s worked on with a more expedient and attentive concentration. The painter builds up the work with many layers, and her closeness to the surface while working transmits a certain intimacy of touch that her works typically convey—an act strangely in tension with the monumental scale.

Another suite of four vertical works is a four-part tone poem (“quadriptych” seems too pedantic a word here) entitled Sleepwalking, and subtitled individually: Braid, Crossstitch, Bloodline and Flowers The scale and dimension of these works, again, veer toward the monumental and vertically monolithic but avoid the temptations of the grandiose by a delicate discharge of paint. Each is an ode to personal memory of the artist’s familial past. In Sleepwalking – Braid, 2023, a rhythmic tumble of slow blue paint moves down the middle of the canvas, knitting the surface of the work in a plodding, pinching weave in the composition: a more personally allusive movement, and perhaps a nod to Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, with the preserved braid of her grandmother replacing mid-20th-century painterly bombast.

Other familial touchstones are present, redolent of patterns and decorations buried in the familial past, but present in a quasi-diminished form: a persistent but time-dulled visual memory to be noted and recorded in paint. In Sleepwalking – Cross-stitch, 2023, a rhythmic pattern of small crosses emerges and fades into the light ground of the surface. In Sleepwalking – Flowers, 2023, varying flower images crawl up the canvas, some a reworked version of rosemaling-style folk decoration, others blotted out and shaped in pure pigment, anchoring the composition. This compelling culling of memory image (what is a flower, according to me, anyway?) highlights memory’s role as it relates to painting, and reinforces the sense of the painterly act as a series of recordings—a popcorn trail of psychic wanderings and personal self-examination— stelae of perceptive memory and observation.

On the entry wall, a grouping of seven canvases distributed above eye level are more celestial in subject. Objects of Interest, 2024, are a suite of four medium-scale canvases: two of them each depict a simplified image of the moon, and are juxtaposed diagonally against a larger image of a space station: the International Space Station, and the Chinese Tiangong Space Station, respectively. Koop’s multi-layered washes and spare approach to delineating form provide the works with a palpable sense of being viewed from a great distance, suffused with a stratospheric, thin, bluish cast—as if seen though a telescope. The position of the pieces astride an image of the moon asserts an equivalence between objects, suggesting man-made objects, and the heavenly bodies now share a common level of perceptive value, which is a disquietingly contemporary notion.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, pieces that seem more ancillary to the exhibition flesh out the artist’s initial feelers and notations for this body of work. Note for Eclipse, 2022, is exactly what’s described in the title. Ukranian Quartet – Power Plant, 2023, appears as a possible rallying point for the larger “Black Sea Portal” series, with the added personal import of a family history: according to the museum didactic, the depiction of the Zaporizhzhia power station in the painting, bombed on March 4, 2022, was exactly 100 years after Koop’s family fled the city by train.

In this body of work, Koop makes the case for painting as an existential and personally historical touchstone, as is perhaps its more fitting place in the melee of the general cultural discourse. Side notes like Black Rose, 2022, and Ghost Tree, 2021, where famously naked—and sparingly denoted—Lawren Harris-ish trees from her area (Riding Mountain National Park, outside of the artist’s home city) reinforce her entrenchment in the art historical continuum in a regional sense, but the works in this exhibition branch out to the international by route of the human—which is ultimately the point of the whole enterprise if you’re doing it right. ❚

“Wanda Koop: WHO OWNS THE MOON” was exhibited at Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Montreal, from April 11, 2024, to August 4, 2024.

Cameron Skene is a Canadian painter and writer based in Montreal.