Pui Tiffany Chow
Pui Tiffany Chow has a wonderful and ambitious solo exhibition up now at Parker Gallery in Los Angeles.
Parker Gallery is proud to present Hurly-Burly, a solo exhibition by Pui Tiffany Chow, her first solo gallery exhibition. Through pointed art historical references, Chow’s paintings examine the female form and the capacity for the canvas to stage them. For her show at Parker Gallery, Chow will exhibit large-scale arched canvases depicting female figures alongside smaller-scale renderings of ribbons and blankets on linen. Chow synthesizes Eastern and Western touchstones of visual culture throughout the ages, from Renaissance frescoes to popular Disney and Japanese animation. The arched shape of her canvases recall classical religious architecture, channeling the historical power of art as propaganda. The motifs in Chow’s ribbon paintings originate in the work of Jean Honoré Fragonard, yet their style is drawn from the color and allure of Sailor Moon cartoons. Traditional Chinese artistic philosophy considers emptiness to be balancing, and Chow employs this theory by omitting dimensional space within the canvas. Beyond the figurative elements in her work, Chow allows only raw linen or black voids rendered with dramatically light absorbing Black 3.0 paint. This type of formation can also be traced back to Henri Matisse’s 1905 painting Le Bonheur de Vivre in which entirely independent motifs are arranged to form a complete composition. In Chow’s work, the figures are similarly self-contained, like captivating performers on an empty proscenium stage. In contrast to the dainty objects of desire in historic masterworks by male artists, Chow’s female figures are massively obtrusive and alien, barely contained by the confines of the canvas. The scale of the figures in relationship to the canvas is directly influenced by the anatomy of Jacopo da Pontormo’s c.1528 painting Visitation, yet Chow’s figures are unpredictable, each a stylistic departure from the last. Chow renders her subjects in wide-ranging tones, from acidic yellows to deep and lush maroons, envisioning them as discrete conduits to other paintings, explicitly borrowing gestural devices from painters such as Mary Heilmann, Charline von Heyl and Georg Baselitz. The multiplicity of references in Chow’s work coalesce classical forms into something queer and abstract, transforming the familiar into an energetic and disorienting sensation. PARKER GALLERY 2441 Glendower Ave Los Angeles, CA 90027 HURLY-BURLY PUI TIFFANY CHOW November 6–December 23, 2022
Pui Tiffany Chow (b. 1987, Hong Kong) immigrated to the US after the Handover of Hong Kong from the British government and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Pui has participated in exhibitions at Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris (2022), Phase Gallery, Los Angeles (2022), Pomona College Chan Gallery, Claremont (2022), After Hours Gallery, Los Angeles (2022), Gravy Gallery, Santa Cruz (2022), One Trick Pony, Los Angeles (2021), Kylin Gallery, Los Angeles (2021), ArtCenter DTLA, Los Angeles (2020), UCLA New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles (2019), Culver Center of the Arts, Riverside, CA (2019) and Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (2018). PARKER GALLERY 2441 Glendower Ave Los Angeles, CA 90027
