Dream Garden, 2024
Zidoun Bossuyt, Luxembourg
Link to Exhibition
After three successful solo exhibitions with Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery across Paris and Dubai, we are pleased to announce the return of Summer Wheat in Luxembourg. Dream Garden will open on 12 October and will be on view through 30 November 2024.
Summer Wheat is known for her vibrant paintings, multifaceted sculptures, and immersive installations that weave together the history of materiality, figuration, and abstraction in both fine art and craft milieus. Each series engages individual and collective human experiences drawn from historical and contemporary sources, mediated through a variety of references ranging from ancient art and medieval tapestries, to etchings from the Renaissance, to modernist abstractions. Using a tongue-in-cheek type of humor inspired by comic strips, Wheat subverts conventional hierarchical structures and stereotypes to create more expansive depictions of daily life throughout history. A signature aspect of Wheat’s work is her expressive use of color and unique method of building a painting, which integrates various tools, from her fingers, to syringes, to plastic scrapers, to cake decorating paraphernalia. Using vibrant, almost fluorescent colors of acrylic paint, she combines multiple physical techniques—pushing paint through wire mesh, painting directly onto a heavily impastoed surface, or applying select embellishments— that require her to move around her canvas, working both vertically and horizontally, on the front and the back of each piece. The result is tactile, vivid work that engages process, form, and narrative equally, creating layered, non-linear compositions that offer alternative versions of history, mythology, and folklore.
The works in Dream Garden depict inside domestic space and even deeper imagined spaces of the subconscious or spiritual world. Wheat’s recent work depicts night and day garden scenes with bright op art color and pattern, but these are internal gardens, places for ideas and feelings to grow and flourish. The show describes psychological or cultural boundaries with a garden fence, a net, or flowerpot. There is contained nature, and freedom expressed within imaginary nature scenes. Inner wells of emotion are coupled with outward cries of expression. Figures are still participating in partnership with nature, but Wheat is thinking of the garden as a point where nature is curated by human organization or intervention. The title Dream Garden came while reworking a drawing of a figure’s shoes. The shoes, standing still among a swarm of bees clinging to the queen, became slippers. Big flowers with sparkling silver veins adorn the slipper’s toe as they step through psychedelic swirls. The unseen figure is sleepwalking in a dream state through a vibrant inner world. The complementary color palette vibrates in the swirling ground, which could be a carpet, or molten ground dotted with blades of grass.
In her practice, Wheat is influenced by both spiritual and art historical forerunners, citing de Vinci, Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606–1669), Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917), and Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987), and concepts connected to internal, external, and cosmic space, mirroring, and nature.