Animistic wonder - 2025/26

Kieran Rook presents his solo show ‘Animistic Wonder’. On view at the gallery Joseph Wales in Margate, this exhibition debuts a cycle of new paintings by Rook, experimenting with surreal narratives that unfold intuitively on the canvas, depicting bodies, animals, and hybrids in dream-like scenarios and disorienting spatial compositions. He reimagines fragments extracted from his inner life whilst envisioning worlds within worlds that bear uncanny resemblance to our own.

Rook’s psychologically layered, deliberately enigmatic works blur reality and fiction, past and present. His paintings operate through symbolism and analogy. Images hint, echo, and stand in for emotional states. Extending the language of the picture beyond the canvas, Rook also constructs the frames himself, treating them as an integral part of the work. At times, three-dimensional elements emerge within or from the painted surface, heightening the sense of liminal space and deepening the work’s shadowed melancholia, as if each scene is suspended in a transitory, dreamlike psychical state.