Artist: Suyi Xu
Exhibition title: Apparitions
Venue: MAMOTH, London, UK
Date: May 17 – June 22, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and MAMOTH, London
MAMOTH is delighted to announce ‘Apparitions’, the London debut of New York-based artist Suyi Xu which will be on show from the 17th of May until the 22nd of June 2024.
Through a visual language of organic shape and linear structure, Suyi Xu creates a dialogue between the built world and wonder in nature. Her paintings bridge inner and outer worlds. The devotional architecture of gates, cathedrals and cloisters holds intuitive, often mirrored, line and shade patterns of symmetry like butterflies or pine cones, shells or vulvas – references that run like a beam through the history of Western art and Eastern philosophies. Trained as an art historian at Barnard College in New York and then as a painter at the School of Visual Arts, Suyi’s research is deeply embedded in the tradition of painting. Her fascination with light is rooted in the transcendent brushstrokes of Rembrandt and the Dutch school as well as the visual vernacular of mystic painters or
the Color Field movement. Shape and form emerge from the picture plane, buttressed by pillars or skeletons of buildings. These elements are lifted from a variety of reference imagery often sourced from books held in large collections like Gemäldegalerie in Berlin or the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, institutions that are themselves fortresses of architecture and power. Raised as a strict atheist in Shanghai, Suyi is careful to suggest she does not adhere to any religious doctrine or institutional dogma, but that she is interested in what these have produced through the harnessing of belief, and how this manifests in a visual medium. The work of Proust, for example, is not about religion, rebirth and resurrection, yet his writing has that as its spine, she explains. For Suyi, the search is for a form of grace as described by Simone Weil – the grace present in a moment of awe and wonder on a rare spellbinding encounter with art, music or nature: the sacred encounter.
Vaulted ceilings in muted hues, subtly glowing spheres and seductive patterns unfurl across immaculate linen canvases. The space rendered by Suyi echoes sacred geometry, as in The Room of Apparitions 2 (all works 2024) , where layered forms become mandalas or lotuses in the subjective eye of the beholder. In The Room of Columns arches become lids, lips or gems. Suyi’s washed-out palette gives a sense of the low-contrast, soft-focus, liminal state between dreaming and waking. The works are apparitions from the light of the mind’s eye. This collection could be, and even feels like, paintings that might be used as tools to assist in achieving transcendence. The artist sees them as her unconscious realms, and recognises her process as echoing the dreamer’s journey in an associative ‘dream-logic’ arrived at through a chance process. The images are subtle and calm: a reverent silence is embedded in the canvas, somehow an antidote to what she refers to as the chaos of New York.
Suyi begins her day by intention-setting and mental preparation as she walks to her Brooklyn studio, seeking solace and solitude through the process of making. On arrival at the studio, she first sweeps the floor. In many cultures, sweeping is a physical gesture and a metaphor for cleaning the mental debris away, making space for contemplation or trance. The previous day she will have turned her canvases away from her to face the wall. This glimpse – or reveal – first thing in the morning is the time she values most in the day: when she sees the canvases anew. Once she has observed them, she then warms up – as one might at the start of a run or a dance – training her hand and eye by beginning some simple sketches of reference imagery from art and architecture. Dropping into a flow state and a meditative process means that as she starts back on her canvas and lets the white pencil glide across the primed linen, she is being guided by her focus and her hand rather than any pre-emptive composition.
‘It is not pleasurable to forge your own drawings,’ she explains. As a result, this presence and responsiveness seem to keep the compositions alive. Her perfect ratio and balance is a natural by-product process, as she works through her ‘projected psyche’. Her unconscious walks her through room after room, like a dream in which there is a first-person traveller, and time and space are internal, only present when felt or observed. In this way, she creates a story-like lucidity, where the main character is either absent, or present in the body of the viewer.
The body of work is distinctive in its rendering of soft, silent worlds in which the figure is absent and yet hinted at in bodily shape and form. In The Room of Coronation , the picture plane is foreground and background simultaneously. This interplay between spatial arrangements is also evident in The Room of Temperance , which – as with all balancing acts – is a mirror composition. At the centre the entrance also becomes a protrusion. Like Magic Eye pictures or optical illusion silhouettes, if you soften your gaze enough two images can be focused between. This trick-of-the-eye of perceptual state also echoes the in-between. Through her work, Suyi combines the formal harmony of expertly honed painterly work, with the appealing ability to invite us into her world.
-Text by Susanna Davies – Crook
Suyi Xu (B. 1996, Shanghai, China) lives and works in New York City, NY, USA.
Xu earned her B.A. in Art History and Visual Arts from Barnard College (New York) and her M.F.A. in the Fine Arts Department of the School of Visual Arts (New York) in 2022. Xu’s paintings are meditations on space, interiors, and architecture that morph into meditations on light and colour fields.
Xu’s work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, with solo exhibitions Free Fall (Europa, New York, 2024), All that is Solid Melts into Air (Fou Gallery, New York, 2022); group exhibitions at Openforum (Berlin, Germany 2024); Felix Artfair (Los Angeles, USA 2024); Fortnight Institute (New York, 2023), Parent Company Gallery (New York, 2023), LATITUDE Gallery (New York, 2023), Gallery Func (Shanghai, 2023), Galerie Hussenot (Paris, 2022), New Collectors Gallery (New York, 2021), and A.I.R. Gallery (New York, 2021). Her works are included in the public collections of Powerlong Museum (Shanghai), Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art (Rizhao, China), and Long Museum (Shanghai).
