November 21, 2025 – January 17, 2026
Opening reception:
Friday November 21, 5-8pm
COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada
↓ InformationCOOPER COLE is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of new paintings, wall works, and sculptures by Antonia Kuo and Douglas Rieger. The artists cultivate a reciprocal dialogue between material and form, exploring the threshold between the organic, mechanized, and bodily. Their works navigate the residue of production and the entropic cycles of creation and collapse, reimagining natural and architectural systems through processes of collage, repetition, and transformation.
Rooted in a shared history of American postindustrial decay, with Kuo’s family having worked in the copper mines of Butte, Montana and Rieger’s family in the coal mines of Pittsburgh, the artists transform remnants of damaged land and infrastructure into sites of poetic reconstruction. The tactile treatment of their materials and the reconfiguration of discarded and manufactured objects evoke the language of industry, the traces of memory, and the persistence of touch.
Kuo’s layered paintings on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper pulse with internal movement, revealing impressions and imprints that echo mechanical operations while retaining a biomorphic quality. The paintings act as sensitive skins, built up through experimental photochemical processing and the application of dyes, pigment, and paint. They serve as indexical records of drawings, photographs, found objects, and gestures of the body. Deluge, a panoramic painting that evokes a turbulent topography marked by frenetic energy, incorporates early sketches Rieger made for his largest sculpture in the exhibition, Dragline. Relief elements punctuate Kuo’s paintings, created from plasma-cut steel, cast-metal detritus, and found metal objects. Metallics and radioactive greens signal both vitality and toxicity, regeneration and ruin.
Drawing from the industrial and the corporeal, Rieger’s sculptures evoke the queer body, the mechanical, the sensual, and the unknown. He pairs meticulously carved wood forms with welded aluminum, layering pigments and paints to create tactile surfaces highlighted by drips and stains. The resulting figures are symbiotic, merging human and machine. Stacked, obsolete machining blocks form the base of the cleft sculpture Overburden. His new wall works incorporate plasma-cut aluminum, welded steel, wood, painted canvas, UV vinyl, wool felt, oil-based clay, and gold leaf. Each piece emerges as a fragment of a speculative environment steeped in desire and decay.
Working in close exchange, Kuo and Rieger sustain a dialogue that mirrors the interconnected systems they explore. Their collaboration, both conceptual and physical, infuses the exhibition with a sense of rhythm, feedback, and transmission. The resulting installation creates an environment where structure and entropy coexist, and where body and landscape are reimagined for the present moment.
To learn more about this exhibition, please provide your contact information.
Antonia Kuo
Sixth Cycle
Sixth Cycle, 2025
Unique painting on silver gelatin paper on panel in aluminum frame, pigment, dye, acrylic, flashe
A.Kuo0004
Antonia Kuo
Triple Blind
Triple Blind, 2025
Unique painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper, photogram on silver gelatin paper, metal relief, in aluminum frame
A.Kuo0002
Antonia Kuo
Electrode
Electrode, 2025
Unique painting on silver gelatin paper on panel in aluminum frame, welded steel studs, enamel, dye
A.Kuo0003
Antonia Kuo
Deluge
Deluge, 2025
Unique painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper in aluminum frame
A.Kuo0005
Douglas Rieger
Dragline
Dragline, 2025
Wood, welded aluminum
D.Rieger0001
