Min-Woo Bang’s forthcoming exhibition, “Natural Impact”, is a highlight at Wagner Contemporary this year. In his new body of work, the artist expresses an emotional and visual response to recent, occurring events: Australia’s bush fires and the pandemic. In each landscape, Australia’s vast and expansive skies are a vehicle for expression, gently absorbing, reflecting and interpreting the intensities and energies in flux below. In this sense, the sky becomes a metaphor for human emotion and mood, conveying a deeply personal and intimate response from the artist, to the observable impact upon nature and self-observable inner landscape of the mind. As such, these new paintings respond to the current moment in time, capturing the beauty of the Australian landscape, while simultaneously “exploring fear experienced from events out of our control”, the artist explains.Here the landscape’s language is powerful, communicating drama via billowing clouds and ripples of light. Dark treetops and faraway horizons invite contemplation of the land as a source of peace and calm as well as a template of emotional intensity. Within each landscape, a strong sense of presence accompanies a tension that is unsettling and underlying the unknown. Min-Woo Bang is a past finalist in the Wynne Prize for Landscape Painting at the Art Gallery of NSW, King’s School Art Prize, NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize and, more recently, the Muswellbrook Art Prize (2019), Hadley’s Art Prize (2019), Tattersall’s Art Prize (2017) and Mosman Art Prize, Highly Commended (2016). He is a past Winner of the KAAF Art Prize and the Gold Coast Art Prize. Min-Woo Bang is a graduate of the National Art School and Sydney College of the Arts.