Forbidden Fruit

A Hug From The Art World is thrilled to present Forbidden Fruit, Summer Wheat’s first exhibition with the gallery. Forbidden Fruit draws from the historical and biblical idea of temptation, desire, knowledge, and consequence, but repositions it within the emotional and psychological realities of contemporary life. In this context, the “forbidden fruit” is no longer simply a symbol of moral transgression; it becomes a metaphor for the burden of awareness in an era shaped by overstimulation, ecological anxiety, and consumption. The work reflects a culture where beauty and seduction are inseparable from systems of exhaustion, performance, surveillance, and instability. By merging lush sensory experience with fragmentation and tension, the paintings speak to a contemporary condition in which pleasure, vulnerability, overload, intimacy, and anxiety coexist simultaneously. The work inhabits a condition where beauty and anxiety can no longer be separated — where intimacy exists alongside surveillance, pleasure alongside exhaustion, abundance alongside ecological fragility, and connection alongside emotional fragmentation. The paintings create immersive environments that feel simultaneously bodily, architectural, digital, and psychological. Nets, lattice structures, woven marks, flowers, fruit, fragmented figures, and densely layered surfaces collapse into one another until distinctions between the natural and the constructed begin to dissolve. The aluminum mesh functions almost like a contemporary metaphor for screens, filters, barriers, membranes, or systems of containment, while still remaining deeply physical and handmade. Rather than illustrating contemporary culture directly, the work absorbs its emotional conditions: overstimulation, constant visibility, information overload, instability, labor, desire, and the pressure of continual performance. The figures drift between seduction and vulnerability, appearing fragmented, partially concealed, or psychologically suspended within the density of the compositions. Fruit becomes more than symbolic temptation — it operates as a language of appetite, consumption, fertility, pleasure, and awareness itself. Across both the drawings and large-scale mesh paintings, the work insists on sensuality, materiality, and touch during a moment increasingly mediated by digital experience and disembodied communication. The paintings resist fixed categories in the same way contemporary identity and experience increasingly resist stable definitions. Painting becomes sculpture, drawing becomes architecture, ornament becomes emotional structure, and decoration becomes psychologically charged. Historical references to postwar abstraction, textile traditions, pointillism, and feminist material practices are present throughout the work, yet they are transformed into something unstable, contemporary, and immersive. The surfaces reward prolonged looking because forms continually emerge and disappear within the visual density, mirroring the fractured sensory experience of contemporary life itself. In this way, Forbidden Fruit becomes less about a singular story and more about inhabiting the instability, seduction, beauty, and emotional complexity of the present moment. Summer Wheat was born in 1977 in Oklahoma City, OK Wheat earned her B.A. from The University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK in 2000 and her M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA in 2005. Her work is featured in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Peréz Art Museum, The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, The Mint Museum, The Speed Art Museum, and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Wheat has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions over the last twenty years, including at The SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA, Fondazione Mudima in Milan, IT, Henry Museum of Art in Seattle, WA, and galleries in Luxembourg, Dubai, Paris, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Istanbul, and New York. In 2025, the Beaux-Arts Conservatory at the Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, MO, commissioned Wheat to create a permanent installation, “JewelHouse”. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.