"The funny thing about illusions is how true they can be. In Soren Hope's solo show, Two Time at New York Life Gallery, there is great truth to be discovered. Deftly playing with abstraction and figuration, repetition and fragmentation, Hope's paintings and prints are at once dazzling and contemplative, decipherable and utterly beguiling. But there are no cheap tricks here-no feints or gotchas. Rather, Hope's show is a profound meditation upon the fallibility of perception and the folly of certainty."
"The body-or its absence-is a theme central to the show. The seven large-scale oil paintings on view feature anatomical disambiguations suspended in washes, daubs, streaks, and fields of fecund, earthy hues. In Like This and Happy at the wrong time, (all works 2025), barely-there forms-a subject leaning forward, spoon to lips in one, the head of another, a clenched fist floating close by-drift through Hope's loose gestures and pools of pigment."
Soren Hope blends abstraction and figuration, using repetition, fragmentation, and anatomical disambiguations to examine perception's instability. Seven large-scale oil paintings present barely-there forms—leaning figures, a spoon to lips, a head, a floating clenched fist—set within washes, daubs, streaks, and fecund, earthy fields. The works resist binary oppositions between seen and unseen or truth and illusion, positioning them as reflections rather than opposites. A suite of five edition variée aquatints with monotype, built from a cleaved bald-head master plate, investigates doubling, variation, and projection. Visual language privileges fiction, projection, and mutable presence over static completeness.
Read at Documentjournal
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