Nguyen Dinh Vu

"My Friends with Red Hats"

2011

‘Autumn Clouds No1’ is a large “abstract figurative” contemporary lacquer on wood panel painting of vertical format, created by Vietnamese artist Nguyen The Hung in 2017. Featuring a palette made of a variety of colors such as black, red, blue and green accentuated with gold leaf, this unframed painting exudes a surrealistic feel that would have made a Joan Miró proud. Painted on a dotted gold, dark green and black ground, a trapezoidal character is facing us. His head, reminiscent of medieval jesters and painted in yellow and red, has a cubist flair. Colorful clouds seem to be falling down the character’s garment and adorn the upper sections of the piece, while scintillating stars accentuate the rest of the composition. Colorful wandering clouds in Hung’s works are inspired by traditional cloud ornaments from Vietnam’s ancient citadels and temples. Those ancient ornaments act like a negative version of clouds wandering throughout the space of the pieces. They link together to create a limbo world, where matters become vague and surreal. Another level lies underneath, hiding deep below the clouds the artist has created realms of consciousness and thoughts. Hung, joyful and relaxed, plays around with his dots. Silver dots, golden dots, together they light up the atmosphere to create a passive aura. Ornamental clouds, or simply just dots, they move from one shape to another, unsettled trying to find a logical order for themselves to fit in therefore challenging viewers’ senses. The order of signs creates spaces of uncertainties and invalidities, where the artist’s stories would be tied together and unfold. Silently, the artist submerges himself into an imaginative valley with no boundaries of shapes, strokes, and of random visual connections. The dreamy artist tries to hold on to his childhood memories, from straw scarecrows, late afternoon birds, handmade kites, boys looking after horses in mountain...

Colorful wandering clouds in Hung’s works are inspired by traditional cloud ornaments from Vietnam’s ancient citadels and temples. Those ancient ornaments act like a negative version of clouds wandering throughout the space of the pieces. They link together to create a limbo world, where matters become vague and surreal. Another level lies underneath, hiding deep below the clouds the artist has created realms of consciousness and thoughts. Hung, joyful and relaxed, plays around with his dots. Silver dots, golden dots, together they light up the atmosphere to create a passive aura. Ornamental clouds, or simply just dots, they move from one shape to another, unsettled trying to find a logical order for themselves to fit in therefore challenging viewers’ senses. The order of signs creates spaces of uncertainties and invalidities, where the artist’s stories would be tied together and unfold. Silently, the artist submerges himself into an imaginative valley with no boundaries of shapes, strokes, and of random visual connections. The dreamy artist tries to hold on to his childhood memories, from straw scarecrows, late afternoon birds, handmade kites, boys looking after horses in mountain...

Colorful wandering clouds in Hung’s works are inspired by traditional cloud ornaments from Vietnam’s ancient citadels and temples. Those ancient ornaments act like a negative version of clouds wandering throughout the space of the pieces. They link together to create a limbo world, where matters become vague and surreal. Another level lies underneath, hiding deep below the clouds the artist has created realms of consciousness and thoughts. Hung, joyful and relaxed, plays around with his dots. Silver dots, golden dots, together they light up the atmosphere to create a passive aura. Ornamental clouds, or simply just dots, they move from one shape to another, unsettled trying to find a logical order for themselves to fit in therefore challenging viewers’ senses. The order of signs creates spaces of uncertainties and invalidities, where the artist’s stories would be tied together and unfold. Silently, the artist submerges himself into an imaginative valley with no boundaries of shapes, strokes, and of random visual connections. The dreamy artist tries to hold on to his childhood memories, from straw scarecrows, late afternoon birds, handmade kites, boys looking after horses in mountain...

Ly Hung Anh is known for his figurative oil on canvas paintings, he often paints members of his family in black, white and grey. “Mother and Child” (Anh's wife and son) is a typical ...

Inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, this oil on canvas painting is a creative interpretation of this iconic symbol. Swirling clouds above the bridge, in ...

An abstracted view of the Art Institute of Chicago's Grand Staircase. The lone sculpture fictionally represents an armed officer pointing a gun at an absent figure. [b. 1977 – New York, NY ::: lives & works – New Haven, CT] CHRIS BARNARD received his BA from Yale and his MFA from The University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Having previously held faculty positions at Denison University, Indiana University, and USC, Barnard is currently associate professor of art at Connecticut College in New London. Barnard’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and New Haven, among other locations, and can be found in public and private collections nationally and internationally. His work is represented by Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, where he and his partner live. artist statement In my work I focus on white supremacy’s relationship to the privileged spaces of my experiences, such as private art and educational institutions. Amidst widening gaps in wealth and opportunity, discussions about race, power, justice and representation—across visual culture broadly—seem more relevant than ever. In many of my compositions, which reference real sites, I have inserted fictional elements to raise questions about the allegiances and priorities of these institutions, as well as people—including myself—who have benefitted from, or continue to support them. The resulting works are representational, but through gestural passages and color and surface manipulation, I aim to suggest instability, corrosion and decay. In the end, I strive to make engaging paintings that suggest dissonance and ambivalence, that entice and challenge viewers, just as painting them does for me. These paintings are rooted in my contemplating Whiteness and emerge from wrestling with the politics of painting—the connections and gaps between painting and lived experience. They also reflect: a love of paint, the act of painting, and the power of the painted image; a regard for practitioners past and present, as well as those for whom practice has not been possible; and an admission of painting’s complicity with hegemonic power. As always, my process remains driven by questions. In this case, questions like: What role does painting play in the face of concrete social crises? How can my paintings respectfully incorporate¬—rather than exploit—relevant and thought-provoking content and imagery? What does it mean to think about racism, dehumanization, injustice, etc., and then to paint such pictures, and in particular as a straight, White man? These questions and this body of work owe much to the work of others, and most acutely to four scholars’ books in particular: The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter; Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder; The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander; and White Rage, by Carol Anderson...

Oil on canvas Signed lower right Unique work 1 / Hélène DUCLOS, 2016 – Artist Statement “Questioning the human condition and the position of being alive – What is it to be a living being? Who / what can we believe? Who / what can we trust? How real is our view of the world? And how is that perspective angled, and ultimately limited? These are the issues at the heart of my work as an artist. Painting, drawing, engraving and embroidery give me the freedom to approach my subjects from an ambivalent and flexible standpoint. I am building up a dynamic body of work, like pieces that you can put together in one way or another to shape different structures, pierced with numerous openings. And the title that I give each piece acts as a possible clue as to how to enter inside that system. I can portray both softness and monstrosities. I focus on the links and barriers lying between living beings and their surroundings, and evoke how permeable these connections are. My aim is not to create a visual documentary reporting fact, but rather immerse myself in observing everyday life, and in a host of images depicting real events (pictures, photos and videos). Instilled with these images, I can give a more personalized, unique and allegorical vision of the world around me. I am also interested in the key transition periods of human existence, those turning points that forge our identity within a family, a group, and society as a whole at the heart of a specific environment. I centre on what makes up and creates cohesion (rituals, myths and tales….), and indeed the opposite - what leads to life becoming shattered, hindered and frustrated (moving populations, exile and migration…) Amidst a landscape roaming with wild beasts and hybrid creatures, between love and separation, metaphors for our own desires and fears lie in hiding, or reveal themselves in the painted or embroidered spaces. Sometimes they are etched with lines, symbols and tiny architectural designs. These works might depict our inner landscapes, as if harking back to a primordial and cosmic point of origin. My most recent collections recreate the images of bodies or landscapes using abstract zones and figurative details that have no direct link with either anatomy or geography. Intimacy and the unspeakable are themes that run throughout my work, and I make sure to incorporate areas of both visual tension and relief, so as to give the viewer the space to project him or herself into the work. And here, such paradoxes can only be reached through the interplay between abstraction and figuration.” 2 / Thierry Delcourt Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author of works on the process of artistic creation, and the conditions of existential and social creativity : "Entering into the world of Hélène Duclos in her drawings, paintings, embroidery and words means letting yourself be carried away by a torrent towards strange shores of creation where only a few artists have ever dared to venture. As if perched on a watchtower on the threshold of different worlds, Hélène Duclos throws us out of our depth, plunging us into spaces filled with destitute mankind, and guiding us through her stem-like maze of a scheme, bristling with roots and clues. But the mystery here, like a poetic, human rebus that never ends, only compels us to take a closer look.” 3 / Hélène Duclos ‘s biography : After graduating from the Duperré School of Applied Arts in Paris with a degree in textile design, I set off on a six-month sea voyage from Vannes in Brittany, to Dakar. On returning to France, I set up my atelier...

Oil on canvas Signed lower right Unique work 1 / Hélène DUCLOS, 2016 – Artist Statement “Questioning the human condition and the position of being aliv...