MICHELE FLETCHER: AFTERTIME
White Cube is pleased to present the first exhibition of London-based painter Michele Fletcher in Hong Kong, ‘Aftertime’.
January 15 - March 15, 2025
‘Aftertime’ draws on the philosophy of Timothy Morton, who asserts that ‘the end of the world has already occurred’ and the work of Michael Marder, who posits that plants inhabit a temporality that is neither linear nor circular, but branching, open ended and generative. Both writers consider the entangled existences of human and natural worlds, as well as the vast expanses of geological time. The works in ‘Aftertime’ deal with this idea of extended duration by conceiving of the life and natural cycles that preceded us and will inevitably outlive us.
Fletcher’s phantasmagoric paintings reveal a world conspicuously devoid of human subjects, where vegetal life surges with unchecked vigour, thriving in perennial bloom. Striated, ribbon-like brushwork can be seen to oscillate between flatness and depth, mimicking the unfurling of flora and conveying a sense of unstoppable growth. The artist draws upon numerous art historical references in her practice, notably the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, with her paintings of geological formations and awe-inspiring landscapes, and the jostling forms of Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, along with Joan Mitchell’s abstract meditations on the natural world. Certain of the paintings, such as the effulgent ‘Fugue’ series (all 2024), echo the changing seasons or diurnal passages of light.
Fletcher’s post-human world is one haunted by absence; here, humankind is only occasionally alluded to by the artist’s evocative choice of artwork title. Reflecting on the recent global pandemic, and revealing Fletcher’s fascination with the science fiction thought-experiments of Ursula K Le Guin, Antigen of Self (2024) employs a lurid yellow that imagines a future reformed by viruses. Elsewhere, Fletcher’s frenetic yet fluid strokes imply a struggle, with titles such as Bloodsport (2024) and Come Away Bruised (2024), invoking the corporeal fragility of the missing human subject.
From vignettes of rugged, wild regrowth to visions of inhospitable weather or overbearing skies, ‘Aftertime’ presents us with our familiar world made foreign. Teeming with abundance, the artist’s work simultaneously betrays a sense of loss, acknowledging humankind’s tenuous position within the ecological order and its coexistence with non-human agency.