Conversations with Nature, Feb. 3. - May 21., 2022
Exhibition at The Yard/Columbus Circle, Manhattan, NY
Curated by Sarah Corona, founder of SARAHCROWN, NY

Part of the Art in Lobbies program, the exhibition is a heartfelt gesture of human communication with nature, as it manifests itself in the cosmos. While Aanestad offers a transcendental approach to light, Yang channels emotion through landscapes. Their works, in their distinct methods and concepts of abstraction, converse with each other and what surrounds them. Conversations with Nature will run between February 3  – May 21, 2022  at The Yard: Columbus Circle’s three floors.

Margrethe Aanestad, based in Stavanger, Norway, and New York City, combines often soft, muted colors with abstraction in a technique both expressive and meticulous. Her watercolors and pastels are uncluttered and skillful, rapid statements of Aanestad’s “vision,” which is twofold in meaning: her artistic conception, and the sensory element of sight. Physical vision comes into play in her work as an exploration of light and space, fundamental to our being, through capturing and creating light on two dimensional surfaces. Her watercolors are bold, warm manifestations of this phenomena: visions of fire, earth, and space. In her large-scale work, cold and monochromatic at first sight, light becomes mental, visual, and gestural; they remind one of oversized watercolors, yet achieved with small strokes of chalk in an arduous process. Aanestad perceives nature stripped of all narrative elements, but leaves present the compassion.

Alice Yaelin Yang, in her first solo exhibition in New York, achieves this tenderness differently, yet equally strong. Her landscapes are refined and dreamlike, combining in another way the double meaning of vision like Aanestad: what Yang sees, and what she envisions in the “inner mind.” Similarly muted colors appear in her work, soft yellows and delicate greens, in a world without shadows. In Yang’s words, this is a way to “prevent defining only one perspective.” Thin, gentle layers of applied paint on canvas with large, clear spaces and contrasting intricate detailing open up space for imagination, the viewers’ and hers simultaneously. These landscapes evoke Cecily Brown, or even earlier works of Edvard Munch– inherently abstract, but bursting with emotion, reverie, and narrative. 

In Conversations with Nature, Yang and Aanestad both attempt to reiterate their visions of what surrounds us all, be it a meadow, a sunset, or a feeling of wonder, and their works connect to each others’ like a gaze between two humans, or a conversation with friends. Viewing them together is to alter one’s vision, and see, feel, relate to nature in connection. 

For more information, please contact: mailto: info@sarahcrown.com / www.sarahcrown.com

Photo: Alexa Hoyer