Wanda Koop

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

Red Dot (Holland) is a striking embodiment of Wanda Koop’s memoir as a globetrotter and an elegant example of her skill as a colourist. Her visual strategies were developed after witnessing the Gulf War of the 1990s as a televised experience, which sparked her interest in technology and its connection to subjective vision and memory, and becoming a recurring motif across her career. The Winnipeg-based artist’s persistent query on the nature of painting produces engrossing environments of wanderlust. In a 2018 interview with White Hot Magazine, Koop spoke on the “subtle exchange of energy” which she brought to life through “wobbled rainbows of colour evoking [the] natural rhythms of the world” in her UNSEEN SEEN series. The mutability of the elements she chose to represent through whimsical and fluid hues in her previous works contrasts with Red Dot’s restricted colour palette, further emphasizing the disconnect between the natural and artificial. Subtle variations in Koop’s layered acrylic pigments against the grains of the cotton rag paper allow her brush-strokes to create a mesmerizing ecru-grey haze - is this a result of smoke or potentially pollution in the area? The succinct composition is interrupted, as the soft-edged bluish figures of buildings and flora on the horizon line are realized: they lie past the barren field, isolated until exposed to the sun. But, the presence of the red-orange dot stands uninterrupted by the gloomy, urbanized scene. The autonomy that the Red Dot imposes outwardly denies the firm axis line of the main road or field, which dominates the right side of the frame. Koop’s exploration of this intersection of urban and natural realms is a familiar focus within her practice, and this is an evocative example of her work.