MATILDA LIU

Secret Gardens | 7 June - 1 July 2023 | Wilder Gallery, 77 College Road, London, NW10 5ES, UK

Ana Benavides | Beatrice Hasell-McCosh| Edward Hongyi Ji | Holly Mills | Margaret R. Thompson | Minyoung Kim | Yiwei Xu Presented in collaboration with Matilda Liu

Botanical motifs and mark-making are closely linked symbolic languages with which painters make sense of the world as well as explore fantasies. By interpreting and understanding naturally occurring patterns, movements, and designs in the universe, artists frequently draw from nature ways to construct their own visual environments and systems of knowledge.

The Voynich Manuscript is an historical example of the convergence of these elements in the creation of an original environment. Discovered in 1992 by rare books dealer Wilfred Voynich, the Voynich Manuscript is a 15th-century book comprised of illustrations of imaginary plants, flowers, astrological charts, as well as an undeciphered text. Despite its beauty, imagination, and intricacy, the manuscript's purpose and translation remain elusive, posing a critical question about the role of art as individualistic scripts of each and every artists’ personal creative vision. By bridging thought and form, seemingly nonsensical marks and haphazard shapes can develop into new systems of meaning, with an inherent order independent of external legibility or physical reality.

As each generation of artists challenge these boundaries of mark-making and imagination, the notion of artists' ownership of their marks and symbols finds concise expression in Kirk Varnedoe's defense of Cy Twombly:

"One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock. In none of these cases would it be true. In each case, the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal 'rules' about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way that the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art."

Titled ‘Secret Gardens’, this group exhibition is inspired by the mysterious hieroglyphic world of the Voynich Manuscript, and looks at how artists continue to engage with botanical motifs to code their own worlds. Using the Voynich Manuscript and Varnedoe's text as the starting point, seven emerging artists find through their unique systems of brushstrokes, colours, and material alchemy the connections between the earthly and astral, the inner and the outer, and the natural and the fantastical. From Minyoung Kim’s surrealist fairy tale imageries to Ana Benavides’ explosive textures, these artists continue to challenge the boundaries of painting, and discover in their individual embrace of chaos and botanical imagination an original form of order—a secret garden to which only they hold the keys.