The pair is a funny thing. It’s perplexed philosophers for centuries, thought about as a kind of illogic where a discrete thing is made more complete by the addition of another, a counterpart. The Ancient Greeks thought particularly about phenomena where each part is oppositional yet when together, becomes harmonic. Examples of this “coincidence of opposites” include night and day, sound and silence, and Harry and Sally.
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In honour of Valentine’s Day – a holiday that celebrates the pair – we’ve curated a collection of art that depicts duos both likely and unlikely. There is Dorothy Braund’s enchanting ‘Shoes’, a still life of two ballet flats that recalls Vincent Van Gogh famous portrait of absence – ‘Shoes’ – and Adam Cullen’s bombastic ‘Cocktail Girl and a Blind Date’.
The idea of duality informs the very materiality of David Rankin’s ‘Hillside at Night I - Diptych’, a landscape in two sheets of paper while in Guan Wei’s ‘Come On!’ seemingly identical figures threaten mutual combustion.
Adam Cullen 'Cocktail Girl and a Blind Date'
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David Rankin 'Hillside at Night I - Diptych'
For the Taoists, embracing the concept of opposites attracting, uniting and needing one another, represents the path towards world peace. With that slightly out of reach, we may settle instead for domestic peace. Whether you are sides of the same coin or a match against the odds, indulge the love you have with a work of art this Valentine’s Day.
Zhang Huan 'To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain'
