Lisson Gallery is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in China by the New York-based artist, Spencer Finch. The exhibition features new and recent work including an LED light installation, a series of pastel on paper works, watercolour drawings, as well as Pantone swatches with pencil on paper. Each work is a conceptually condensed chronicle of a journey or experience, often an interaction between the artist and nature: from the study of the opacity and translucency of a cloud, to the tracing of a bee’s flight pattern as it pollinates flowers in a garden.
The title of the presentation, 'Forever is composed of Nows', is borrowed from an Emily Dickinson book of poems. The title reflects how – while each individual work in the exhibition is an observation of a defined moment or event – together, these snapshots create a panoptic whole, each a recording of Finch’s extraordinary experiments, challenging himself to capture ineffable temporal and sensory experiences using a variety of everyday materials and tools.
Inspired by Monet’s practice of planting a garden with the express intention of painting it, Finch’s Following a bee (2021) is a series of drawings centered around a large bunch of zinnia flowers, planted for this purpose by the artist from seeds. Perched on a ladder above the flowers, Finch followed each bee’s flight pattern as it cross-pollinated the zinnia, creating a line in acetate as a surrealistic trace of their journey. Finch then selected one each of the varieties of zinnias and matched the colours using pastel.
Alongside this is the LED work, Reciting poetry at the greening of spring (2023), produced following a recent visit to The Getty Center in Los Angeles where he saw the Chinese painter Wu Li’s hanging scroll, Reciting Poetry before the Yellowing of Autumn (1674). Finch then recited two poems to the trees in Prospect Park, Brooklyn – There’s a little madness in the Spring by Emily Dickinson, and O sweet spontaneous by E.E. Cummings – and, inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s mastery of light and atmosphere, translated the hues he observed into a series of LED tubes filtered with bands of colour. Similarly, in Cloud (cumulus, Glacier National Park) (2023) Finch studied the opacity and translucency of a cloud using 3M ‘magic tape’ to articulate the subtle changes in cloud formation, serving as a poetic alternative to the hypnotic experience of gazing into the sky.
The exhibition also features two watercolour drawings, Pacific Ocean Laguna Beach, LA 7/27/14 (2015) and Atlantic Ocean from Isle au Haut (2017), from an ongoing series based on observations of various bodies of water at different times of day, translating the immense, vast forces of nature into delicate, graceful lines. Alongside this are three works from the series titled, Study for Ulysses (Coney Island) (2023), titled after James Joyce’s novel, which document a day of wandering as a series of fleeting colour sensations. From morning to night, Finch extracted and abstracted colours from his environment using the commercial colour-matching system Pantone. Arranged in the gallery, these works echo not only the artist’s physical movements throughout the day, but also the journey of his mind – the shifts in hue and tone mirroring each new interruption or encounter in consciousness.
