Zoe Koke (b. 1989. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA).
Zoe Koke holds an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2019) and a BFA from Concordia University, Montréal (2013). Selected two person exhibits include Agony/Serendi- pity (2023) at Smart Objects (LA), Made to Look Natural (2018) at Smart Objects, Landers, CA; and Forced air: les ventilateurs at Les Territoires, Montréal (2015). Recent group exhibi- tions include Re/flex, Patel Brown Gallery, Toronto (2022); Celebration, Insect Gallery (2020), Fever Dream, One Trick Pony, Los Angeles (2020); Doesn’t whine by blue moon, Ochi Pro- jects, Los Angeles (2020), among others. Koke currently has a two person show called the serpent’s tail on view at Alice Amati in London.
Speed, gas, evaporation and disappearance are conceptualized as embodiments of Capita- lism in Zoe Koke’s paintings. The materiality and disintegration of nature become the primary subject in her work, pointing to our divorced connection with our surroundings as well as our own bodies and senses. The distance between abstraction and figuration is a realm to examine power. In Koke’s work, the notion of a landscape isn’t fixed, rather it shifts, dissolves and recedes. Titles take their shape from simple observations as well as important cultural texts, markers for overlapping histories of omission, destruction and regeneration. She looks to the representation of nature in Art History, considering the notion of the Sublime, the Renais- sance, Impressionism, Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and hobby art, to conceptually meditate on how depicting the landscape has long been a part of human ritual, domination and survival. Koke considers her work an envelope of alternatives for perception, intending to consider the physical as well as the metaphysical and cultural containers that shape our fraught relationship with our physical environment.
