Solar Music / Lunar Revel
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Solar Music / Lunar Revel
Piper Bangs, Katherine Bradford, Shuyi Cao, Christian Franzen, Jess Xiaoyi Han, Yulia Iosilzon, Olivia Jia, Wanda Koop, Reeha Lim, Zoe McGuire, Heidi Norton, Laurie Nye, Katie Paterson, Anna Danyang Song, Jia Sung, Daniel Um, Angela Wei, and Leon Zhan.
Curated by Lucy Liu
June 27 — August 16, 2025
Opening reception: Friday, June 27, 6-8pm
Uffner & Liu is pleased to present Solar Music / Lunar Revel, a group exhibition that explores the dual forces of the sun and moon — radiant and reflective, irrefutable and elusive — as they move in continual dialogue across the sky and through the human psyche. These celestial bodies, long central to the visual, spiritual, and scientific vocabularies of cultures across time, serve here as metaphoric and material anchors for a range of inquiries — mythological, phenomenological, ecological, and affective. Participating artists include Piper Bangs, Katherine Bradford, Shuyi Cao, Christian Franzen, Jess Xiaoyi Han, Yulia Iosilzon, Olivia Jia, Wanda Koop, Reeha Lim, Zoe McGuire, Heidi Norton, Laurie Nye, Katie Paterson, Anna Danyang Song, Jia Sung, Daniel Um, Angela Wei, and Leon Zhan.
The exhibition title borrows from Solar Music (1955), a painting by Spanish-Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo, in which a cloaked figure strums golden rays of sunlight like harp strings. Varo’s image offers a key interpretive lens for the show: the notion that a substance as immaterial as light — and by extension, the indefinable theses of artmarking — can be channeled, translated, and transfigured through aesthetic form. In this way, the sun and moon serve as both metaphor and methodology for the artists in Solar Music / Lunar Revel, a conduit to render the intangible visible.
Several artists engage these celestial archetypes through layered and surreal landscapes. Yulia Iosilzon’s luminous painting shimmers with slippery figures and teeming color, like scenes from a fevered fairytale. In Laurie Nye’s Emo Landscape, a candy-colored sun peeks through a psychedelic landscape, where fantastical plant-life and radiant forms enter into fluid communion. Piper Bangs’ twilight pears glisten in the moonlight, their anthropomorphic forms evoking feelings of introspection and melancholy.
And then there’s Katherine Bradford, whose iconic, enigmatic figures float in an ultramarine sea, accompanied by a monumental vessel and a doubled horizon line where sun and moon co-exist. Oncoming Ship captures a sense of suspended time — not quite night, not quite day — and the quiet, cosmic intimacy of people wading through it all together.
Other artists keep their gaze squarely skyward, erasing the trace of humanity altogether. Wanda Koop offers a stark, beautiful image of an eclipse — a dark circle floating against a desaturated horizon like a held breath. Shuyi Cao’s sculptures feel plucked from a lunar garden, where shells, minerals, and botanical fragments are fused into fossils both ancient and futuristic. Katie Paterson’s works draw on astronomical research and geological materials to translate time and distance on a cosmic scale. In one work, veins of ink swirl across paper in patterns that recall marbled stone or planetary topographies. In another, a line of text in sterling silver reads like a cosmic invocation: A solar flare containing all the light in the universe.
For the first time since 2021, a single exhibition occupies both floors of the gallery, with the presentation conceived as a two-part, immersive cosmos. The ground floor is dedicated to the “solar” — a radiant ecosystem of works that channel warmth, vitality, and revelation. Upstairs, the atmosphere shifts into the “lunar” — a more introspective and nocturnal space, attuned to transformation and the subconscious. While each floor maintains its own mood and rhythm, the transition between them invites viewers to traverse thresholds, to move fluidly between light and shadow.
Together, the works in the exhibition form a polyphonic chorus — solar music and lunar revelry — that celebrates duality not as opposition but as a generative interplay. The participating artists approach the sun and moon as symbolic entities through which to consider broader ideas — creation and destruction, order and chaos, rationality and intuition, the seen and the veiled. Whether through surrealist imagination or material experimentation, each work becomes a kind of cosmogram: a visual attempt to trace the forces that govern not just the sky above us, but the inner constellations of thought, emotion, and being.
– Lucy Liu
Please call +1 (212) 274-0064 or email Lucy Liu, Partner, lucy@uffnerliu.com for more information
