New York
Mary Lum: when the sky is a shapeYancey Richardson presents when the sky is a shape, an exhibition of new paintings and painted photo collages by Chinese American artist Mary Lum. The works in the exhibition draw on cultural detritus and the urban environment as a foundation from which to explore geometric abstraction, perspectival space, and language.
Added to list
Done
Removed
Lum’s large scale paintings derive from collage studies made of printed material, ephemera and photographs taken during long, unstructured walks through the streets of London, Paris, and New York. Inspired by Guy Debord’s concept of psychogeography and an experimental method of communication called hypergraphy, the paintings combine stuttering lines of abstracted letter forms with architectural details and flat fields of color. Jazzy and nonsensical, they communicate the energy and cacophony of the city. In a series of small, jewel-like painted photocollages, images of signage and storefronts are fragmented and stripped of their loci within layered, kaleidoscopic arrangements of color and line.
Using acrylic paint, photographs, paper, glue, colored pencil, watercolor, gouache, and house paint, Lum’s shapes and surfaces each contain a history. Underneath are other paintings and collages, sometimes peeking through, often completely hidden. According to the artist, “Each image is a paracosm, an imaginary world constructed over time, containing aspects drawn from the real world but in many cases seen out of order. These are imperfectly imagined worlds where things may be awkward, crooked, in the wrong place, too smooth, too rough, overly layered, or left bare.” Made during the pandemic, the works in the exhibition express the unsettled nature of the times and the artist’s longing to be in the cities she normally frequents.
Mary Lum was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan and her MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work has been featured in Invisible Cities at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, and Tell It To My Heart at the Kunstmuseum fur Geganwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study (2004-2005), and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2018, 2012). She is a professor of painting and drawing at Bennington College, in Bennington, VT.
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
