Weather or not

Fair weather or foul, the forecasts of today’s meteorologists seem to have ignited the imagination of New York-based painter and sculptor Win Knowlton. With a sharp sense of humor and a discerning eye, he turns his attention to the natural world—particularly as it stands vulnerable in the face of climate change.

As a keen observer of weather, Knowlton contemplates the blazing sun, wisps of clouds drifting across a clear sky, lush vegetation sprouting from damp garden soil, fire licking at tree trunks, and the cracked dryness of parched earth. Rather than attempting to depict nature in its entirety, he distills its essence—focusing on specific natural elements and weather phenomena through an abstract, elliptical lens.

His clean, simplified forms are born from deep reflection on elemental concepts: weather, trees, stones, celestial bodies, wind. With vivid colors, sharply defined shapes, and a deliberate fragmentation of form, Knowlton constructs a kind of meta-conceptual system—an encrypted visual language for interpreting landscapes and atmospheric conditions. “Weather creates landscape. Weather creates space,” he says of his artistic expression.

At Kourd Gallery, the exhibition Weather or Not, curated by Eleni Varopoulou, offers a space devoted to the theme of weather while also investigating the relationships between material, technique, image scale, unity, and fragmentation.

Photographs taken by the artist himself during his time in Greece—enlarged and mounted on the gallery walls—serve as backdrops: tapestries of landscape upon which painted works emerge like sculptural elements. These three-dimensional details extend from the flat surface, forming a kind of immersive installation.

Artists’ fascination with meteorological phenomena can be traced back to the mid-15th century, when Renaissance painters began to examine the intricacies of cloud formations. Storms, tornadoes, seasonal shifts—and, more broadly, the overwhelming power of nature—have stirred the imaginations of painters for centuries.

These themes have deeply influenced the trajectory of landscape painting across various schools and artistic movements. Leafing through an atlas of historic landscapes on canvas, paper, or wood, one cannot help but be moved by the works of Nicolas Poussin—a 17th-century master whom Turner discovered at the Louvre in 1802, who was admired by Constable, copied by Géricault, and studied by Cézanne.

In Poussin’s paintings, weather serves not only as a narrative device but often features in the very titles—such as Landscape with a Tower, also known as Calm Weather.

—Eleni Varopoulou, Exhibition Curator

Kourd Gallery
4, Kassianis str., 114 71, Athens, Greece.

15.05 – 27.09.2025
Tuesday to Friday 12.00 – 20.00
Saturday 11.00 – 15.00