HONG KONG – February 20, 2025 Ora-Ora is pleased to announce a new solo show by UK-born, US-based artist Stephen Thorpe. The title is The Last Word Always Belongs to the Mountain. This new exhibition will take place at Ora-Ora’s Tai Kwun space during Art Month (March 2025). The artist will also be part of Ora-Ora’s group show at Art Basel Hong Kong.
Thorpe returns to Ora-Ora in Hong Kong for a second solo show, a city where he taught at Savannah College of Art and Design for several years. The artist will be travelling from his home in New York City to Hong Kong to be present at the opening event and available for interview.
In this brand-new solo exhibition at Ora-Ora, the paintings are all new, never seen before, and represent a subtle, visual pivot from his previous solo exhibition at Ora-Ora, Enter the Forest at its Darkest Point (2022). The title is a quotation from Russia-born mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev, whose words intone a deep accordance of respect for the mountain. Throughout history and across cultures, mountains have been regarded as places of power and mysticism, home to deities, ascetic sages, and creatures of myth. Depicted as thresholds between the mortal world and the divine, their rugged peaks form the border where human ambition meets the unknown.
Thorpe’s new paintings explore our fractured relationship with these culturally significant landscapes, through contrasts of tone and texture, challenging our assumptions of what is marginal and what is teeming with life and meaning. In so doing, he inverts our expectations of the exterior and the interior, and invites a conscious examination of interiority. His paintings frame far-off mountains with unique flatness and eerie unreality, while birds are harbingers of vague foreboding.
Textural contrast is formed through the juxtaposition of a quasi-woven, hewn “frame,” and the mountain range in the centre. Thorpe muses on a disconnect of modern lives, how we have become unanchored from manual labour, from tradition and centuries-old certainties, forging a tangible sense of groundlessness which his paintings amplify.
In the words of Ora-Ora co-founder and CEO, Henrietta Tsui-Leung, “Stephen Thorpe’s new series is a journey to far away mountain ranges, yet deeply connected to our society and to our own psychology. His paintings represent beautiful schisms, chasms, fractures and surprising harmonies in which we learn surprising truths about
ourselves.”
Stephen Thorpe embodies unique combinations of psychology and landscape, deliciously pairing the lavish and opulent with the prosaic. His work resists classification, drawing on thematic influences including Carl Jung, and stylistic precedents from Japanese woodcuts and the landscapes of Scotland. Thorpe’s intricately composed paintings are deliberately rendered to represent dualities, synergies, and contradictions. Such nuances are present in all aspects of the work – from his painterly process, with visceral and physical applications of paint paired with contemplative, controlled marks; to the chosen subject matter, encompassing busy patterns, half-familiar objects, and skewed perspectives juxtaposed with quiet, singular planes of
colour.