BAROQUE APOCALYPSE by Anne Katrine Senstad accompanied by a 4 CHANNEL sound environment by ACCLAIMED COMPOSER JG Thirlwell
THE SYLVIA WALD AND PO KIM GALLERY, NEW YORK
February 11 – April 18, 2026
The Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Art Foundation is pleased to present Baroque Apocalypse by Anne Katrine Senstad with a 4-channel sound environment by the renowned composer JG Thirlwell created for the installation.This marks the foundation’s first solo exhibition of the Norwegian interdisciplinary artist, and the ninth large-scale light sculpture of Senstad’s spatial neon series, ELEMENTS.
Baroque Apocalypse draws from an amalgamation of science, poetics of space, and the prophetic. The scientific phenomenon of sonoluminescence invokes transformative notions of immensity and poeisis, where creation brings forth the sublime and the unknown.
In sonoluminescing events, microscopic gas bubbles suspended in liquid are driven into violent implosive collapse by intense acoustic fields, momentarily concentrating energy into extreme thermodynamic conditions that release glorious flashes of light through mere radiative excitation
This radical event engenders a transformation from one state to another, emitting energy, light, and color reminiscent of cosmological phenomena. Further excited by the presence of noble gases, its luminous effect wildly intensifies, mirrored in the inter-relationship between light and electricity, noble gases and color, sound and space, that defines Baroque Apocalypse.
Neon lights contain variations of the rare noble gases, Argon, Neon, Krypton, Xenon, and Helium. In Senstad’s compositional practice, these elements coexist as both ether-material and as conjunctural visceral colors. In Baroque Apocalypse, royal rose pink, cobalt blue, emerald green, and Apollo’s yellow compose an architectural colonnade of vertical columns effectuating a cross-pollination of Nūr, ignition, a spark — an ascent to the absolute. The sonically illuminated gas bubble personifies an apocalyptic luminal event where the scaffolding of a humanist ornamentation, is designed to aestheticize the end and metabolize Nirvana.
In Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), imperialist conquest and man’s insatiable greed are portrayed by Klaus Kinski’s character, Lope de Aguirre’s feverish search for El Dorado, the pre-Colombian city of gold in the Amazon. In proclaiming “I am the Wrath of God! Who’s with me?” Aguirre represents man’s cyclical history descending into savagery and madness as he is led astray by his delusions of grandeur, his drive toward destruction, and the vanity of power. Man’s divine delusion is a theatre of the mind, where unveiled clarity occurs by atonement, unification, or liberation from Samsara.
ELEMENTS IX was conceived as an ascension situated within a horizon defined by a space inhabited by a topological, spectral presence that envelopes our body, awakening cognitive sensation. The art work’s composition, originating with ELEMENTS I (2018), is oriented on the convergence of lines as perspective and the classical colonnade. For Baroque Apocalypse, these aesthetics allude to the emotive markings of The Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, temples of antiquity, and Cathedral architecture, where sensations of the passage of time, participation, devotion, and destination appears. Through the neon colonnade we are invited to experience the primordial, where light and sound frequencies touch upon the very atoms of our being.
Here, the art work suggests an expansive sensory time-experience. The chromatic intensity of neon colors increases over time, expanding its luminal waveforms. Thus, the nature of neon light is an organic one, never artificial. It is in continuous movement, emitting abundance through its perpetual absence of form. With its eternal presence, light represents the perceptual experience of the infinite and the deepest elements of our shared humanity.
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