In the Asphalt City

'In the Asphalt City' brings together new works by William Lowry and Yuri Hwang, whose practices approach the contemporary city as an inhabited environment and a structure for organising images and attention. The exhibition takes its title from Bertolt Brecht’s 1921 poem 'Of Poor B.B.' (Vom armen B.B.), in which the speaker describes himself as carried from the "black forests" into the asphalt city: a landscape of concrete and crowds that feels alienating yet strangely habitable. Across the exhibition, Lowry and Hwang consider how figures occupy spaces shaped by architecture and images, and how intimacy persists within environments that encourage distance. Both artists construct images through processes of inscription and layering. Lowry presents etched copper works made through traditional printmaking processes, painted into or overlaid onto surfaces of drawn and painted wood grain. Anonymous figures emerge within architectural settings that hover between the contemporary and the archaic, occupying city edges and threshold-like spaces. His use of copper gives these images a physical presence, with reflective and scarred surfaces that sit somewhere between picture and object. Hwang similarly treats the image as something embedded within a material support. Her drypoint canvases take printmaking’s history as a technology of mass reproduction - the lineage the screen extends - and return it to a unique object. Her figures inhabit domestic and public spaces of the city, searching for connection that is manufactured and mediated through surface. The incised canvas holds this contradiction, reflecting the tensions between the individual and wider systems of architecture, visual organisation, legibility and consumption. Placed together, the works move between different technologies of looking and different temporalities of image-making. The incision of an etched line suggests duration and resistance, while the language of the screen introduces speed and circulation. In both practices, figures appear caught within structures larger than themselves, framed by streets and surfaces that shape how they are seen. Brecht’s asphalt city provides a loose psychological architecture for this meeting. In 'Of Poor B.B.', the metropolis is artificial yet familiar, and crowded yet marked by detachment. Its apparent permanence is shadowed by the knowledge that both its inhabitants and its buildings will disappear. Lowry and Hwang approach the city through a related instability. Their works move between intimacy and estrangement, locating human presence within environments that feel inhabited yet provisional.