Artist: Rick Lowe

Gagosian presents Harbour Fragments, an exhibition of new paintings by Rick Lowe. These works abstract from aerial views of Hong Kong that feature sections of Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong Island, and Kowloon Peninsula, interpreting the dynamic metropolis. On view at the gallery’s location in Hong Kong’s Central district, this is Lowe’s first solo exhibition in Asia.

Taking an exploratory approach to geography and abstraction, Lowe’s practice encompasses both studio work and community-based projects that address urban transformation. His vibrant canvases employ the visual languages of painting, collage, and cartography. These paintings emerge from an improvisational approach derived in part from games of dominoes that Lowe plays with residents worldwide, adapting their intricate patterns and juxtapositions to foreground aspects of urban structures and civic relationships.

To produce Harbour Fragments, Lowe initially made a single large-scale painting measuring 12 × 28 feet (3.6 × 8.5 meters) across twenty-one canvases measuring 4 × 4 feet (1.2 × 1.2 meters) each. He then split the composition into nine individual works of one, two, four, or six canvases each, further developing each painting by adjusting its visual elements and in some cases its orientation. All but two of the panels feature a segment of Victoria Harbour, highlighting the essential relationship between water and land in shaping Hong Kong’s past and present.

Rather than directly index cityscape features like a map does, Lowe’s paintings abstract urban structures, relationships, and identities as jostling grids and vectors. Complex geometries of blue lines reflect the watery expanses of Victoria Harbour while greens stand in for Hong Kong’s mountains and parks. Numerous white and red circles—their groupings based on the arrangements of dots on dominoes—function, the artist notes, “as if they are flowers in a landscape of lights dotted on the edge of the city.” Polychromatic shapes and arcing lines traverse the compositions, suggesting the roads, bridges, and tunnels that connect the city’s districts to one another and to the larger region. Several paintings suggest multiple vantages, reading simultaneously as bird’s-eye views and as traditional landscape paintings with a horizon line, the blue in their upper sections legible as either water or sky.

In new works on paper, Lowe experiments further with painting and collage to reflect on geometric, geographic, and social relationships. In these abstractions, initial continuities of color and form have been reconfigured to produce a new order, their arrangements evocative of shuffled domino tiles.

Lowe will participate in the two-day Reimagining Urban Futures forum organized by the Hong Kong Arts Centre, part of the Urban Renewal Fund–sponsored RE: Tai Kok Tsui initiative that is dedicated to exploring innovative pathways to urban regeneration He will deliver a closing keynote address, “Notes from the Field: Project Row Houses—An Empowered Community through Art and Direct Action” at Eaton HK, 380 Nathan Road, Kowloon, on September 5 at 5pm. Lowe will also lead the “Tracing Social Sculpture” workshop at the RE: Tai Kok Tsui Pavilion, near Olympian City 2, on September 6, from 2 to 3:30pm.