Cooper Lobby Artist Feature: Surge Witrön
The Cooper Building lobby is welcoming a new voice, and it’s one that speaks in layers, memories, and carefully held tension. This season, the Cooper Building is proud to feature Los Angeles based artist Surge Witrön, whose solo exhibition Everything Is Romantic (Again, Again) transforms the lobby into a space for reflection, intimacy, and return.
An Exploration of Visual DNA
At the core of Witrön’s practice is what he describes as “visual DNA.” His work blends abstract painting, gestural mark-making, and narrative fragments to explore how identity is shaped through family, lineage, and inherited practices. By integrating family artifacts, traditions, and found materials, Witrön recontextualizes the familiar, uncovering layered stories rooted in his matriarchal lineage.
These works move beyond personal history. They invite viewers to pause and consider their own familial connections, the objects and rituals that quietly shape who we are, and how memory is carried forward through repetition.
Everything Is Romantic (Again, Again)
Rather than treating romance as an idealized relationship or fixed emotion, Everything Is Romantic (Again, Again) examines romance as a recursive process. The exhibition traces cycles of self-recognition, discovery, rupture, and return, positioning love as something provisional and accumulative rather than resolved.
Inspired by Charli XCX’s Everything Is Romantic, the exhibition leans into irony not as distance from feeling, but as a tool that allows sincerity to survive. Witrön’s works sit comfortably within this tension, acknowledging the constructed nature of intimacy while maintaining its emotional weight.
Set against the rhythms of contemporary urban and digital life, the exhibition reflects on how intimacy and selfhood are continually mediated, reshaped, and replayed. Influences of Mexican maximalism and cultural heritage surface through vibrant layering, reinforcing the idea that romance, like identity, is shaped through repetition and lived experience.
A Practice That Extends Beyond the Studio
In addition to his studio practice, Witrön is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, an artist run gallery in downtown Los Angeles, and a co-founder of MÄARLA, a nomadic artist run gallery operating between Berlin and Mexico City. This global perspective enriches his work, allowing it to resonate across cultural landscapes while remaining deeply personal.
Experience the Exhibition
Located in the heart of the Cooper Building lobby, Everything Is Romantic (Again, Again) offers a moment of quiet contemplation within the daily flow of the space. It’s an invitation to slow down, reflect, and reconsider how romance, memory, and identity repeat themselves over time.
We invite you to experience Surge Witrön’s work during your next visit and engage with the stories that continue to unfold, again and again.
Follow the artist on Instagram @surgeinabottle.
