ANNE CHU

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Friday, February 27 to April 19, 2009

The Donald Young Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by New York based artist Anne Chu. The artist mines the history of figuration across cultures and eras to create works that evoke ritual, storytelling, and mythology. Her wide-ranging sources are employed more for their capacity to trigger the imagination than for their particular references.

Showing in the gallery's new space, a nickel bronze bear head sits atop a tall pedestal. The bear is a constant subject of Chu's work, for which she first received recognition in 1996 with a series of life-size cast paper bears derived from diverse sources including Chinese burial ceramics and European medieval subjects. The expressive sculpted surfaces of the bronze head impart depth and pattern, while the form emotes the iconic strength of the bear.

A second sculptural installation includes a floating figure accompanied by a second figure on the ground. The frontal view of the works suggests mass and depth, but when viewed in the round, the hollow cast aluminum forms defy gravity and challenge the viewer's perceptions about strength and structure.

More recently Chu has employed forms of goats in her work, and for this exhibition she presents a cast bronze goat standing within a set of polychrome ceramic cubes. The contrast of the solid bronze volume and empty space refers to minimalist sculpture or drawing, while the addition of the literal figure lends a psychological and art historical tension.

Also included in the exhibition are a group of Chu's multicolored egg tempra and oil paintings, which convey a layered surface, a landscape of paint that refers to her three-dimensional work through its suggestion of volume and depth.  

Lastly, Chu exhibits two ink jet prints, photographic studies of her embroidered bird sculptures, which demonstrate the ways that complex patterns both mimic and hide a figure's formal shape and color.

This event marks Anne Chu's fourth solo show with the Donald Young Gallery. Past solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Chu's work was included in the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Westfaelischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany.