Picturing the Post-Human Age

Angela Lane's solo show of mini-landscapes with New Age vibes at Anat Ebgi, LA

It’s a strange feeling to be thinking and writing on the same day about art that falls at the extremes of political engagement, to spend the morning trying to process the experience of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s posthumous exhibition at Deitch Projects — of bodies burning and churning in the horrors of the world — and then transition over lunch and a coffee to consideration of a series of domestically-scaled landscapes by Angela Lane, now on view at Anat Ebgi. In a way, it’s a microcosm of our general condition as human beings in 2026, ping-ponging from the awfulness of the news, both local and global, to the delights of everyday life, which continue to find us even in our despair. There are enough hours in the day, it seems, for listening to podcasts about our civilization’s imminent demise and compulsively hearting clips of Knicks fans in jubilation.

In reality, the art world and art history are equally capacious, with room for the “merely” decorative and the sharply critical and everything in between: for Matisse’s art “like a good armchair”¹ and Warhol’s “Art is anything you can get away with,” as well as for Maciunas’s “REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART” and Laderman-Ukeles’s “Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art” (the radical feminist take on Warhol’s take on Duchamp). Beauty — that great taboo of the last hundred years — also need not be categorically rejected in a turn towards the political; as Gertrude Stein once put it, “If every one were not so indolent they would realize that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.”² Such a relativizing position might grate on some, but I find it preferable to bull-headed polemics that inevitably prove inadequate to describe (much less judge) a world of art too vast and diverse to be brought to heel by any one person’s pre- or proscriptions.

That doesn’t mean we don’t each have our tastes and our hang-ups, and one of mine is anxiety about appearing frivolous or fluffy. Writing on a day when Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in history and we might have a ceasefire with Iran and secret memos have revealed that the White House was thinking about suspending habeas corpus so they could deport people even faster… I do feel some kind of way about asking you to look closely with me at pink-ish paintings of trees and skies and astronomical phenomena. In the end, though, I was surprised by what they prodded me to think about: a post-human world of stunning sunsets and eclipses that couldn’t be farther from the bleak apocalyptic future Hollywood has envisioned for the planet. Whether the post-human is actually articulated in the paintings or is simply a matter of projection on my part, I’m not sure, but the work took me somewhere, and I appreciate anything that can transport me, even for a minute, out of our current hellscape.

Come along!

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Angela Lane: Phase Shift, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

Angela Lane, Burning Sky, 2025. Image courtesy Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

One of the first works you see upon entering Angela Lane’s solo exhibition “Phase Shift” at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, is the oil painting Burning Sky, 2025, which depicts exactly what its title says: a salmon-tinged sky with a wisp of fire at its center, hovering above a pastoral landscape barren save for a few lines of trees. It’s unclear whether the flame is rising slowly, as if from an unseen candle, or descending with velocity: it’s discrete and seemingly contained, with a vaguely vaginal teardrop shape that suggests a portal opening up into the heavens or, more ominously, a meteor about to crash into the earth. The landscape, with its delicately painted windswept plains, appears unbothered.

Despite the grandeur of its subject, Burning Sky is petite: it’s one of eighteen oil paintings on birch plywood, all made in 2025 and 2026, most of them roughly the size of a large postcard or a trade paperback, with a few larger works closer to the scale of a magazine or an exhibition catalogue.

Installation view of Angela Lane, “Phase Shift,” Anat Ebgi Los Angeles, 2026

The size of the paintings and the tightness of Lane’s brushstrokes forces you in very close; in a museum with a guard nearby, I’m certain I’d have been yelled at for having my nose less than an inch from the surface of the work, marveling at scumbled lines coalescing into foliage. Part of what makes these paintings beguiling is the push-and-pull between the intimacy of the viewing experience and the distance implied by what the paintings represent when you take them in again as pictures. There’s pleasure in close viewing and uncertainty in contemplating the familiar-yet-strange meteorological (cosmological? mystical? divine?) events that mark each painting: beams, flashes, and arcs of light; double suns and moons; auras; and eclipses of various totalities.

Angela Lane, Nexus, 2025. Image courtesy Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

The landscapes in each work feel anodyne by comparison, but they’re unsettling too: devoid of humans and human-made structures, they’re both empty and eerily anonymous. I was surprised to learn that Lane is English and lives in New Zealand, both places strongly associated with their verdant landscapes, neither of which appear to have strongly influenced the ones in these paintings. These imaginings come closer to sci-fi and fantasy, on the one hand, and to fantasies of lush, virgin landscapes from the history of art on the other.

Lane was included in a recent group show at the London gallery Cob, for which the press release noted, “Her unpeopled scenes are not empty: we are not depicted because we are the witnesses.” I want to suggest that these are instead premonitions, visions of a world to come, when civilization as we know it falls and nature returns, unfettered by notions of “progress” that, as we have seen, come at a terrible price. I’m reminded of dolphins returning to the Venice canals during Covid, when the various forms of capitalist enterprise driven by relentless tourism were forced to shut down. What would nature allow if humans were out of the picture entirely?

Angela Lane, Conduit (After K.S.L.), 2026. Image courtesy Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

Lane’s paintings, which admittedly struck me at first as apolitical and escapist, in fact radiate with the anxieties of our age. (I mean, duh — that’s often precisely what escapism is about.) She is self-consciously part of a long history of artists using skyscapes and landscapes to represent and exorcize social anxieties; her Instagram (@subterraneanthunder) alternates images of her own paintings with work by some of her historical precedents, many of whom depicted meteorological phenomena in the early years of modernity, no doubt a time of great uncertainty and fear. Lane’s work looks backward — at a history of art and science rife with images of phenomena real and imagined — and forward, I think, to a future we won’t be here to see.

Screenshot of @subterraneanthunder

So what comes after this, after us? If Lane’s paintings are harbingers of the post-anthropocene (or maybe the post-post-anthropocene, depending on what other epoch of decline awaits), then what comes after looks rather serene, sky-bending beams of light notwithstanding. Perhaps whoever, or whatever, arrives to populate this place will treat it with greater awe and respect than we have.

Thank you for reading! If you’re in Los Angeles, I highly recommend seeing these paintings at Anat Ebgi for yourself. They’re even more luminous in person. The exhibition remains on view through July 18, 2026.

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1. I used furniture as a bit of an extended metaphor in a recent review about a group show of abstraction that bears some similarities to what I explore here. See “Infinity’s Edge,” Nazarian / Curcio, Artforum (March 2026): https://www.artforum.com/events/infinitys-edge-nazarian-curcio-review-1234744504/

2. Gertrude Stein, “Composition As Explanation,” originally published by Hogarth Press in 1926. Accessible at: https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Stein_Composition-as-Explanation.html