Birdie Chance

Two tiny golfers stand on a strip of pale green paint, sizing up a shot. Everything around them, the fairways, the bunkers, the rough, is made of thick slabs of oil paint pushed across the canvas with a palette knife. The white blobs read instantly as sand traps, though up close they are just ridges and furrows of pigment that never fully flattened out. The whole scene is seen from above, like a drone shot of a golf course, and the darker green ridges even mimic the striped mowing patterns you see on real turf.

Werner Bronkhorst, born in South Africa and now working in Western Australia, has built his practice around this one clever trick: lay down a landscape in raw, sculptural paint, then add figures so small they could be painted with a single hair. The scale shift does the work. A smear that would be meaningless on its own becomes a putting green the moment someone is standing on it with a golf bag. The title is a golfer's term for a hole where you might score one under par, which suggests these two are feeling optimistic about their chances, though from this height it is hard to say where the pin even is.