CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/20/2022

Celebrate Earth Day with the hyperreal feel of 'Landscape Painting Now'

Makiko Kudo’s “Burning Red” (2012) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, our best-selling 2019 survey edited by Todd Bradway and the genesis for Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes, the show Bradway has curated for Aquavella Galleries in Palm Springs and New York City right now. “The wide-eyed girls who populate Makiko Kudo’s landscapes are the witnesses more than protagonists of stories that might take place within them,” Barry Schwabsky writes; “we see the verdant scene as though from their point of view: a double consciousness of a familiar place where, she says, ‘the scenery is shining in my eyes… burned into my brain.’ It is a hyperreality enjoined by feeling rather than by minute attention to details; what ties it to Pop is not the banality of the everyday but quite the opposite, a childlike wonder at even the most ordinary things (which, for instance, Warhol projected onto the Campbell’s soup his mother gave him for lunch every day as a kid).”