A radio dial tunes to BBC News, searching for the familiar, unbroken voices channelling the airwaves to deliver the latest news. In Still Weather, however, the dial rewires and diverts, finding instead a language of weather and nature.

A bird is calling out, a low thunder rumbles, wind gently whispers through the airwaves. The signal refracts as though through a prism, splitting into a chorus of sound and its component colours. Everything in Still weather is a variation of that same principle.

The full spectrum of colour disperses across the exhibition’s paintings. But the colour is filtered, run through silt, as if clarity itself had become a kind of dishonesty. Koak began thinking towards this exhibition in the strange interval after the last U.S. election in November 2024. A stomach-drop of realising what is ahead, a slow release of dread. It is a peculiarly modern condition of living inside a future you already anticipate, with no choice but to wait for its arrival.

(Text by Sofia Hallström)

Koak (b. 1981, USA), based in San Francisco, is known for work that portrays the complex duality of identity and human nature through a mastery of line that extends across drawing, painting and sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include: The window set, Charleston, Lewes, UK (2025); Lake Margrethe, Perrotin, Paris (2024); The canary, Bibeau Krueger, New York (2023); Letter to myself (when the world is on fire), Altman Siegel, San Francisco (2023); The driver, Perrotin, Hong Kong (2022); Return to feeling, Altman Siegel, San Francisco (2020); and Holding breath, Union Pacific, London (2019). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Below here a deep well, Perrotin, Tokyo (2027), and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco (2027). Koak’s work is held in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Musées d’Angers, Angers, France.