The Earth Laughs

The Lobby
Opening October 2021

The Earth Laughs exhibition at The Lobby is taken from an Emerson quote which expresses, “The Earth Laughs in Flowers”—How appropriate for a private collection which prioritizes beauty! And this exhibition certainly does not disappoint. Through a diverse body of work ranging from traditional oil painting, books, sculpture, ceramic, design, paintings without paint, to a major video installation, The Earth Laughs hopes to highlight the splendor and awe that we feel before nature through the form of the flower.

The biggest work in the show is TeamLab’s presentation, Flower and People – A Whole Year per Hour, a 12-monitor video installation. TeamLab is an international collective of artists, programmers, engineers, mathematicians, and architects, and have shown what an interdisciplinary collective is able to achieve, using digital technology, taking art one step further into the video and three-dimensional frame as well as dazzling the viewer with its precision, mechanics and dare I say—beauty. This is the first time TeamLab will be showing in Portland OR and The Lobby is pleased to bring the international art conversation to the local community!

Other works in the exhibition include David Hockney’s Ipad prints from his series, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, an area where he lives in England whose landscape is the inspiration for these prints along with A Bigger Book, a Taschen publication of the full breath of Hockney’s work over the last 60 years. As the book is oversized, it is installed on a Mark Newson designed bookstand. An artist well known from figurative to landscapes, his work is always an injection of elegance and refinement.

Another older statesman of the show is a monoprint series titled Flowers by Andy Warhol. Made from a collage of construction paper in different colors, each work has a personality all its own. Lastly, in the hallway is a print series by Alex Katz, from The Flowers Portfolio.

Max Jansons, Karin Gulbran, Petra Cortright, the Campana Brothers and Margarite Humeau shed a a multigenerational light on how the Earth Laughs. Gulbran does so with her ceramic vases of animals and flowers; Humeau does this with her interest in science and alchemy as shown in her dynamic bronze flower; Cortright using the computer and pixels as her paint, splicing different flower images from the internet to create one image produced on aluminum; the Campana Brothers mixing their interests of design, functionality and art to create sculpture; and Jansons interest in the traditional, using aged oil and real pigments, using known tropes such as the still life, imbedding it with contemporary visual signs to capture the viewer’s attention, have all come together in this show in perfect harmony …and in the face of such organic simplicity: The Earth Laughs.