COMA is pleased to present Renée Estée's third solo presentation with the gallery, titled One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, on view from 9 October through 14 November, 2026.
Borrowing its title from the traditional magpie counting rhyme, One for Sorrow, Two for Joy presents a new body of paintings by Renée Estée that considers the enduring human impulse to transform chance into meaning. Drawing upon folklore, ritual and inherited superstition, the exhibition explores the stories we construct to navigate uncertainty, asking how coincidence becomes narrative and how ordinary encounters come to feel charged with significance.
Estée has long been interested in the ways we navigate life through signs and superstition, often looking for them in birds and animals, chance encounters, or small coincidences that suddenly seem to carry meaning. A butterfly flying into the studio can feel like a good omen, and a particular bird can change the feeling of a day. There is a similar phenomenon that unfolds as she paints, whereby chance and intuition become entangled during the painting process. The figures in each painting emulate these attempts to grasp onto fleeting chance encounters or omens. They reach out for something just beyond themselves, falling, floating and searching, trying to hold
onto a feeling, a memory, a moment of hope or luck - embodying this human impetus to make sense of the nonsensical and ascribe meaning to the indescribable.
In some works, their eyes are obscured by paint, leaving them unable to see what they reach for. This uncertainty, and the possibility of misreading a sign or seeing an omen where there may only be coincidence, sits at the heart of the exhibition. The birds, eggs, nests, dandelions and other symbols that recur throughout grow from the same impulse: a desire to find guidance, protection, possibility or reassurance in the world around us. The paintings become a kind of self- portrait of that searching.
Not every sign, however, is a blessing.
Estée is equally interested in what happens when an omen feels ominous, when something alluring might also be dangerous, or when we mistake what we desire for what is good for us. Deadly Nightshade (sometimes you need to walk away) introduces this note of instability, a counterpoint to a show that might otherwise read as entirely hopeful. If the thing you are reaching toward is actually harmful, the meaning we find may not be the one we hoped for. In Can't keep holding onto sorrow, a figure's hands almost close around a solitary magpie, which Estée has placed just beyond their grasp. The work directly references the opening line of the rhyme and the title of the exhibition, yet complicates the superstition rather than simply illustrating it. If a single magpie traditionally signals sorrow, what happens when we refuse to let that prediction determine how we move through the world? The figure is caught between holding on and letting go, between the desire to keep something close and the knowledge that it can no longer be held. Here the magpie no longer has to signify sorrow; it is simply allowed to leave. In that sense, release becomes its own kind of omen, a refusal to let sorrow, or the expectation of sorrow, take precedence.
