Zoe Koke: Blue Sky and Yellow Sunflower
An artist’s recesses become a condition, a preparation to transmit, a commitment to oneself.
—Luchita Hurtado
We were involved with a kind of meditation, and for me this had a great deal to do with the study of nature, and the study of pattern…We were dealing with art as a way of meditation.
—Lee Mullican
Sunrise is a prayer
I wake inside consecutive nights to Jupiter,
glowing blue above a Los Angeles freeway
Remembering feels sharper now.
These days, I think more concretely under what presses.
I want my body to be heard in what I offer
My car etches a repeated line from the city to the desert,
to where the land quiets and the sky fills
I want to hear something delivered from deep within the earth
I wait in still moments, light and dark, for what arrives
I walk an emptied ocean floor, aimless—
under stars, sun,
clouds, strewn
The kitten frenzied, chases his own tail
bathed in orange light, an open question
Mouth wet, teeth new
The plants drink thirstily the hot dry day
Water lurches from the faucet—
Miraculous
My father told me:
When you look into the eyes of a cat, you see yourself
When you stare upon a mountain, you gaze into a mirror
When you look at another person, you see your reflection
When I look out on the horizon, I see hope.
If all consciousness is God,
there’s no room for stature,
just offerings
We splinter because heavy forces want distance
Yet, I think we ache the same and hear each other's thoughts, fears
images, sounds, objects, conjurings
The enduring conversation perseveres
What is made proliferates, settles
Seeds cast to wind
A child’s dance with a flower
Fragments scattered
By breath, by hands
Time and places touch
And the sun retreats from one sky for another
A lamp lit elsewhere
Then we sleep;
Humbled by our joint need for rest
We tumble into beginning again
—Zoe Koke
Along the rungs of detachment, ascent and return lead to true nature. In a photo of the artist as a child she’s guided between sisters’ hands. Lead by careful grips they mind the ground as she looks up from under yellow bangs toward the adult behind the camera. “If the eye were not sun-like, how could it behold the light?” (1) Open receptors to living currents, belonging wherever beauty is witnessed, like the porous attention of animals.
A bird sings in the face of an ambivalent, salt-bitten earth. Sincere, attuned, often dismissed as naïve, its call erodes self-righteousness, emptying domination and cynicism. At the song’s horizon we’re left to wade in infinite presence—to reconcile tomorrow as hopeful promise and shared fate. Blue Sky and Yellow Sunflower (2): paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture, are evidence of such.
Bed is the studio, meditation is the studio, solitude is the studio, kitchen table is the studio, music is the studio, road is the studio, friendship is the studio, light is the studio, detritus is the studio, walking is the studio, waiting is the studio, reading is the studio, desert is the studio, studio is the studio, sensation is the studio
1.Goethe, Zahme Xenien, 1796
2.Song by Susumu Yokota, 2004
Luchita Hurtado (1920–2020)
Luchita Hurtado was a Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles–based artist whose practice spanned over eight decades. Moving fluidly between abstraction and figuration, her work centers on an investigation of universality and transcendence. The breadth of her experimentation involved unconventional techniques, materials and styles that speak to the multicultural contexts that shaped her life and career. Closely connected to generations of artists and writers from the Dynaton movement to the LA avant-garde, Hurtado nonetheless worked largely outside the structures of recognition until late in life, when her visionary, feminist, and ecological sensibility was acknowledged as foundational to postwar American art. Her first solo museum exhibition took place in 2019 at the Serpentine Galleries in London, which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Today her work is held in the permanent collections of institutions such as MoMA, the Pérez Art Museum, and the Hammer Museum among others.
Lee Mullican (1919–1998)
Lee Mullican was an American artist whose hypnotic mark-making fused Eastern philosophy, modern physics, and mid-century abstraction into a visual language of vibrational rhythms. A central figure in the Dynaton movement, he developed a distinctive technique of layered, "striations” that pulse across the canvas, rendering perception as living field rather than a fixed image. Deeply influenced by meditation, jazz, and quantum thought, Mullican approached painting as both a cosmological inquiry and a disciplined daily practice, a way of tuning into the invisible structures that shape reality. His work proposes art as a site where science, spirit, and sensation meet, inviting viewers into a recalibration of how seeing and being intertwine. Mullican was a longtime Professor of Art at UCLA and exhibited widely throughout his lifetime, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pasadena Art Museum, and UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery. His work is held in the permanent collections of museums including MoMA, SFMOMA, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum among others.
Zoe Koke (b. 1989)
Zoe Koke is an artist whose work engages landscape and materiality as sites of psychic projection where the natural world becomes a medium of inner life. Her paintings hold unstable environments that drift and gather through touch and repetition, registering how inner experience presses itself into physical form. Reworking art historical traditions of landscape painting through contemporary forms, Koke treats nature as a site where power, ritual, and survival converge. In her paintings and sculptural works, landforms erode, dissolve, and reassemble, mirroring the ways human systems mark, exploit, and mythologize the earth. Titles drawn from everyday observation and cultural texts function as anchors that together connect histories of destruction and regeneration. Recent solo exhibitions include tide at Franz Kaka, Toronto (2025), Unchained Melody at Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2024), and the second space at Mai 36, Zurich (2023). Koke lives and works between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert.