Doron Langberg. Night

About

Featuring large-scale tableaux of nightclubs and beach scenes, Night is a hymn to nocturnal worlds both interior and exterior, and the spaces of ambiguity, opportunity and liberation – physical and psychological – that open up after dark. The exhibition coincides with Part of Your World, the artist’s first solo institutional presentation in Europe, on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam from 1 February–26 May 2024. It is accompanied by a new essay by writer Hannah Baer.

Doron Langberg’s intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity, forging a relationship between interior and exterior realities and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by one another. In these new large-scale works Langberg develops a range of thematic and pictorial concerns, chiefly the dynamic interplay between people and the spaces they inhabit. Titled after queer New York parties and club nights – such as Merge and Wrecked ­­– the spaces in these paintings are worlds in themselves, sites of multiple layers and levels of experience and connection. Together, the works create a narrative arc that follows the course of an evening, a night out becoming the morning after as we move from Basement to Sunrise.

Langberg’s paintings often dissolve certainties of form between individual bodies and between bodies and their surroundings. Orchestrating multiple figures, as well as details of textiles, clothing, interior patterns and aspects of nature he builds compositions in which figures – seen here dancing, cruising, reclining, embracing – appear to move in or out of focus, emerging from or receding into their surroundings, at times declarative, at times spectral. Areas of a painting might appear emphatic or consciously indeterminate, leaving passages of abstraction: gaps, questions – or breathing spaces – that lend the work a more speculative emotional register.

Light in these paintings plays an especially active role; multi-directional, describing the hypnotising effects of strobe or fog machine, it also signals less tangible sources – the heightened, erotic atmosphere of a night out, or the collective energy that builds from a gathering of people. Time stretches within and between works. Declarative instants of euphoric crescendo coexist with hazier, moments, perhaps indicative of more fleeting encounters.