Angela Lyn: Works 2008 - 2021
Exhibition Dates: May 16 - July 18, 2023
Address: 55 E 11th St, 5th Floor, New York, NY
(by appointment only)
Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of two exhibitions by Angela Lyn.
On May 16, 2023, Angela Lyn: Works 2008 – 2021 will open at the gallery space in Greenwich Village. On May 20, 2023, Angela Lyn: Passage - in the wake of the world will open at Artfarm, presenting more recent works. The exhibitions will conclude on July 18.
There will be a performance conceived by Angela Lyn in collaboration with composer Jesse Bannister and choreographer Durante Verzola in conjunction with the May 20 opening.
In a conversation on the occasion of the exhibition The Long Journey Home in 2017, she remarked that “my work is neither Chinese nor western but both.” Although she has recently turned to a variety of non-traditional media in her work, since the beginning of her career she has favored working in oil on canvas. The subject matter of a 2006 exhibition Landscapes and Portraits sounds traditional enough but the paintings themselves were already very distinctive, drained of color and lacking any recognizable features. They were characterized by an emptiness that can be found both in early Chinese and Japanese art and German Romantic painting. The elongated formats she used on occasion were also unusual, more akin to scroll paintings than to any form of Western landscape.
The paintings on display in Greenwich Village are from three different series executed between 2008 and 2021 and may be seen as a prelude to the works of 2023 on display at ArtFarm. Overall, Everwhere 2008, is an exception to these observations as it is from a series titled My China in which Lyn also included paintings of small objects that spoke to her of her partially Chinese ancestry.
Now is the Time I,II & III, On the Edge of Town I & II, and Aviator, dating from 2021, form part of the series In the Blue and show further developments of the characteristics already noted in her earlier works. Unlike traditional landscape painters Lyn does not need to travel to find motifs to paint as since moving into her studio overlooking Lake Lugano, the views from her studio windows provide endless satisfaction. The magnificent Himalayan cedars growing right outside her window have become a major source of inspiration, whether their scale is suggested by detailed studies of individual branches – never an entire tree! – or close -up views of foliage.
Tree School I, II & III and Centurions of Spring II & III ,2021, were included in Lyn’s most ambitions exhibition to date, On the Edge of Time, 2022, at the Villa Arconati FAR, a large baroque villa on the outskirts of Milan. Installed very sparsely in the massive rooms of the villa, only some of which have been restored, Lyn’s austere and precisely executed paintings became focal points through their austerity.
The reductiveness in Lyn’s painting that is one of its essential characteristics is further developed in the series of paintings exhibited at ArtFarm although in the performance devised by the artist they serve as markers in a metaphorical journey.
Passage - in the wake of the world
is a trans-disciplinary, trans-generational and trans-cultural artists collaboration bringing together a painter, a musician and a choreographer. The three artists have built this project long distance between Miami, London and Lugano. Passage - in the wake of the world will launch on May 20, 2023 at Artfarm, Salt Point New York and travel to various cities while evolving throughout its journey.
“Angela Lyn’s Passage - in the wake of the world is an extraordinary artwork in pace with the times. It is an artistic inquiry of uncertainties and fragilities, fears and hopes, contradictions and paradoxes of the present times.
The complexity, depth and manifoldness of the work is the consequence of an artistic and societal urgency, realized in an unparalleled collaboration of three artists containing multitudes – different in their disciplinary practices and competences, in age, gender, living environments and culture.”
- Giaco Schiesser
Professor emeritus of Zurich University of the Arts