Parkview Art Hong Kong is pleased to present “Looking Out, Searching In” co-organized with New York’s Agora Gallery, and featuring four contemporary European abstract artists across two generations: John Franzen, Amélie Ducommun, John Kingerlee, and Edward Belbruno. The exhibition highlights the breadth of abstraction seen through two radically different starting points—while Belbruno and Franzen draw upon science, Kingerlee and Ducommun find inspiration through nature.

An astrophysicist and mathematician, painting is a way for German-born Ed Belbruno to unleash creative energy in a field marked by facts and evidence. Science is the root of his abstraction but through art he strives for a balanced co-existence of the imaginative and the inventive. Maastricht-based, John Franzen creates quietly energetic drawings spurred by his interest and investigations in cosmology, quantum physics, and philosophical concepts of existence. His drawings, composed of concentrated lines in ink or pencil, becomes an exposé of his inner self.

Approaching abstract painting from a perspective closer to home, Irish painter Edward Kingerlee’s muse is the glorious landscapes of nature, in particular, the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, where he has resided since the early 1980s. Colour and brushstrokes become the visual guide where majestic skies and lush countryside are transformed into abstracted energies on canvas. Also looking to her surrounding environments, Barcelona-based Amélie Ducommun captures the energy of land and seascapes, while at once conveying the ephemerality of memories of her experiences with nature, and the lingering emotions it leaves behind. Often inspired by her travels, Ducommun’s paintings strive to become a mapping of memories.

Despite the polarities in their sources of inspiration, the end paintings all express the visual power of abstraction, its ability to emancipate the mind and unshackle the subconscious self through pencil, paint, colour, form and line.