Upcoming Exhibition

EUAN MACLEOD - RODNEY POPLE

Shadows : Hong Kong 2020

The exhibition of over 30 new paintings is based on the artists’ impressions of the city gained during a 2019 research trip to Hong Kong. In each artist’s own characteristic approach, Macleod and Pople depict contemporary Hong Kong as a metaphor for a world in which environmental and political landscapes are in a state of flux.

The visually compelling images in Shadows: Hong Kong 2020 reveal through largely figurative and narrative works themes of alienation, tenacity, defiance and impudence. Macleod and Pople’s paintings have a cinematic resonance, invoking the uncanny and sometimes disturbing quality of screen-based dramas inspired by the place and context in which they are set – Hong Kong in 2020.

Euan Macleod is best known for his haunting depictions of isolated human figures in the landscape or city spaces. His work is underpinned by a fascination with the psyche of individuals as they attempt to navigate a path through the philosophical and external challenges of our times. Macleod’s paintings are symbolic rather than literal, encapsulating the spirit of place, Hong Kong in the case of this series of paintings, and, more broadly, shared aspects of the human condition.

Rodney Pople combines empiric observation with imagined propositions, offering alternative perspectives of the world that might confront or polemicise the status quo. His Hong Kong 2020 series of paintings incorporates features of Hong Kong that have become familiar, both historically and recently, such as the endangered but ubiquitous yellow-crested cockatoo – that for Pople represents freedom – and the black umbrellas that have come to represent the democracy protests.