The recent Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum (traveling from the Musée d’Orsay and Petit Palais, France) provides the public with a moment to reflect upon how Courbet’s approaches to crossing artistic boundaries led to innovative developments in art, painting, and the very notion of the artist. Ironically, this is most apparent by what […]

In 1990, The World of Female Painters opened at China Central Academy of Fine Arts. I had just graduated from college. As a curator and a participating artist, I was nervous to see the audience’s feedback, just like any young person who organized an exhibition for the first time. The ’85 New Wave and the […]

I approach my work with specific formal concerns. I think about materials that create activities when they interact with light. The materials I am attracted to absorb, reflect, and transmit direct light, light filtered by film, and video projection. Through these activities, I am interested in producing excess, and thus eventually, creating a fantastic space. […]

The name Andrew Penfold is actually a pen name used to disguise the identity of an English based landscape artist and illustrator who was inspired to tackle the subject of human sexuality by a visit to Amsterdam’s Museum of Erotica in 2006. Using this alias allows Andrew to enjoy both anonymity and the freedom to […]

This round of works by the prolific, Bob Dylan-admiring Canadian artist Marcel Dzama exposes his interest in the political realm, although the artist was quick to point out (in response to a prying journalist’s question) that it is his intention to be oblique rather than dogmatic in his approach to subjects such as the Bush […]

My drawings have often been described as organic surrealism and I suppose, since I was born under the sign of Taurus, it seems only natural that my art should have an earthy quality about it. I never know what I am going to draw when I sit down with my enormous sheet of white paper, […]

For Your Pleasure has been instigated to celebrate the opening of the new Matches store in Marylebone High Street, London. My contribution to the store is based on circus imagery. I have been a life-long fan of circus stemming from my mother’s love of it. She quite literally ran away with one when I was […]

My work is a by-product of the visionary experiences I’ve been having since I was a child. Starting at the age of seven, they were basically out-of-body experiences that occurred in bed at night as I tried to go asleep. Instead of sleeping, I would leave my body, astrally projecting into another realm. In this […]

As Mao Ze-Dong, Abraham Lincoln, the Pope, the Statute of Liberty, Lenin, Stalin, and Marx appear in one picture, histories resurface against a grayish yellow backdrop. These political icons stride forward, side by side, with their arms and palms stretched wide open, an adamant look on their faces. They are the great men in Chinese […]

Dana Schutz’s early paintings of distorted humans and unearthly scenes earned her acclaim for their absurdist sensibility and a painterly style reminiscent of Gaugin. Eschewing naturalism, Schutz’s work favors visceral feeling over faithful visual representation. The subjects of her paintings are no less surreal than the way in which they’re rendered; a series of “self-eaters” […]