The End series, features five airbrushed paintings, made specifically for the exhibition. The works are displayed hung from the ceiling in a graduating line, reminiscent of shooting targets in not only the pattern, but their display and framing. The formatting of each work, when turned landscape, also speaks to that of a television, with the colours and pattern referring to the Looney Tunes beginning and end credits. The works hold a tension between the representational image of a target, and the notion of abstraction in the concentric circles. The End paintings have been informed by the formal history of target paintings in Contemporary Art, from the work of Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns, to Ugo Rondinone. The flatness achieved by airbrushing, and the construction of the painted line creates an almost visual vibration, that pulls the eye through the work. Wielebinkski also refers to wrestling mats, cartoon violence, eclipses and the possibility of endless worlds and suns. In titling these works The End, he refers to the literalness of an apocalyptic ending to the world, but in numbering each piece, holds hope for the possibility or beginning of the next.

Wielebinski’s commission could be viewed as a processing of terminal capitalism and the omnipresence of a collective low-grade anxiety. In the wake of a pandemic that forced the tilling of our social ground, exposing our governing systems and conventions to scrutiny they could not withstand, this exhibition imagines how we might position our individual and public selves anew. And with it comes an unexpected playfulness and optimism, the ineffable condition of living in a time in which apocalyptic precarity feels realistic and maybe also revelatory.