Reconnecting with Nature, Memory, and Painting: “WOODS LANDS MEADOWS” Exhibition at Frieze House Seoul

Have you ever thought about how nature, a city, or a geography from our childhood takes root in our memory? Sometimes a single map line, sometimes a dried leaf, and sometimes a photo frame lets us relive that scenery in a completely different language. Right on the heels of this exact feeling, we have news of a fantastic exhibition!

Paula Cooper Gallery is guesting at Frieze House Seoul with an impressive exhibition titled “WOODS LANDS MEADOWS,” which takes its name from Carl Andre’s 1972 poem. Able to be visited between August 27 and September 19, 2026, this selection re-examines landscape, nature, and the built environment across a broad spectrum ranging from painting to sculpture, photography to collage, and written words.

Maps, Memory, and the Hidden Traces of Nature

The artists featured in the exhibition approach nature not merely as a beautiful scenery to be observed, but as a living space where memory, personal histories, and social traces accumulate.

• Personal Maps and Migration: While Cynthia Hawkins reimagines maps as moving and dynamic structures of perception, Veronica Ryan recalls her childhood island landscape, migration, loss, and the fragility of nature through map imagery and organic forms.
• Traces of History and the City: While Carl Andre creates a poetic landscape using the language of the colonial era, Sol LeWitt transforms Florence into an abstract form by cutting out its historic center from an aerial photograph of the city. Meanwhile, Hans Haacke materializes the invisible movement of wind and air with white balloons in his work Sky Line (1967).
• Invasive Species and Politics: Walid Raad reveals that surprising intersection where nature and conflict cross by showing how invasive bird species turn into an instrument of ecological struggle.

From Image to Material: The Spirit of the Landscape

In another layer of the exhibition, the landscape confronts us as metaphor, image, and directly as the material itself.

Terry Adkins brings wildlife onto paper, while Jennifer Bartlett juxtaposes the organic form of the tree with the rational order of the grid system. Cecily Brown’s artwork Temptation of the Lapin (2023), inspired by Richard Adams’s famous novel Watership Down, turns the forest into a chaotic allegory of oppression and the struggle for survival. Tauba Auerbach and Meg Webster, on the other hand, bring texture, color, and scent to the forefront by directly using pigmentary and natural substances.

If your path leads to Seoul these days, step inside Frieze House Seoul and discover through this special exhibition how the geographies we inhabit are reconstructed in our memory!