A Dark Spring at Copro Gallery: Emma Black, Xue Wang & Richard Ahnert

To celebrate the arrival of spring, Copro Gallery in Santa Monica presents a group exhibition featuring three international artists – Emma Black (UK), Xue Wang (UK) and Richard Ahnert (Canada). Though distinct in their visual languages, all three explore emotion, metaphor and narrative through imagery that balances sweetness with a subtly satirical dark twist.

Emma Black’s series Where We Fade explores the human body as something encountered, misunderstood and gently repurposed. Her paintings imagine an outsider, almost alien in perspective, discovering a decaying human form and responding not with violence, but with fascination. Bodies are fragmented and transformed into ornamental objects, echoing domestic rituals of display: table settings, keepsakes, preserved remains.

Pearls, flowers and confectionery adorn these forms, creating a disquieting tension between tenderness and transgression. Beneath the sweetness lies a deeper reflection on emotional depletion—the experience of giving too much of oneself, of being slowly hollowed out by care that is unintentional or unaware. Black’s work inhabits that uneasy space where beauty coexists with discomfort, asking whether intention alone can ever absolve harm.

In Private Eden, Xue Wang adopts a different yet equally provocative strategy. Her paintings may initially appear delicate or even “cute,” but their charm is deceptive. Memory—real or imagined—becomes a repository from which she draws images that quietly disturb. Like a wasp resting on a frosted cake, unease creeps into the sweetness. With a background in fashion and a practice rooted in juxtaposition and imaginative freedom, Wang embraces subtle provocation, inviting viewers to question nostalgia and the seductive pull of the past.

Richard Ahnert’s House Broken shifts the focus toward anthropomorphic animals placed in unexpected, almost theatrical scenarios. Based in Toronto, Ahnert infuses his paintings with a quiet animism, suggesting an intimate kinship between human and animal worlds. His works possess a voyeuristic quality and understated humor, blending the familiar with the surreal. Whimsical yet reflective, they invite us to reconsider instinct, domestication and the thin veneer separating civility from wildness.

Together, the three exhibitions create a layered dialogue about perception, preservation and projection. At Copro Gallery, spring unfolds not in lightness, but in a compelling exploration of what lies beneath appearances—where sweetness unsettles, care transgresses and humor reveals something quietly profound.

Xue Wang