The Grass Above Us brings together works from the private collection of @adamharber_ua , featuring eleven artists from different generations. Across more than thirty artworks created in a variety of techniques and media, the exhibition explores themes of loss, destruction, and renewal within the natural world. This selection creates a cohesive environment in which individual pieces, including artworks and poetry, enter into dialogue and construct a multi-layered narrative
The Surface series is a rare instance of Vlada Ralko (b.1969) working with landscapes. She began it in 2011, and while never interested in merely depicting scenery, she sought a way to approach it on her own terms. She found a direction in thinking about the literary works of Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and other Japanese authors, for whom the state of nature or the depiction of surroundings served to reveal a character’s hidden emotions. Vlada resonated with the idea of expressing the inner world through the outer one.
In Vlada’s Surface paintings it feels as if we can see the insides of these landscapes, their anatomy, raw flesh, as though split open. And as we contemplate these bodily landscapes, there is a distinct sense of witnessing something deeply private