Anh Trần

Let us run

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December 17, 2022 - February 4, 2023

Opening Friday, December 16   18-20h

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There’s something spontaneous and intimate at the heart of Anh Trần’s paintings. The personal is expressed textually and physically, but that personal reaches out to all of us. The layers and construction are felt with the eyes, distant and closer. Mark making moves beyond the paintbrush, with fingers, palette knives, sprays all connecting each body who views them directly to their surface. The letter ‘I’ repeats as either the initial roman numeral or a centering of the painter herself within her canvases. There’s a care that these offspring do not run off with her control. The formal influences of the big boys of abstract expressionism can not be denied, as Trần gently extends their history to include herself and so much left out from that initial moment. That some life could be returned to that well worn art historical area eighty years after its beginnings comes completely from a criticality delivered indirectly through humor and a lighthearted touch. Trần’s works recall the past as they shine outward, like Sleeping Beauty woken decades later with a kiss of the wider world.

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