Christine Wu was recently interviewed by online culture website PROHBTD discussing her creative process, the emotion behind her work, and fun tid-bits like what famous person dead or alive she’d like to paint; visit prohbtd.com to read the full interview.
We’re also excited to share Christine Wu is now a part of the notorious Dean Collection.
New York-based artist Christine Wu and Swedish painter Linnea Strid packed Thinkspace Gallery on opening night, January 23, for their exhibitions “Sleepless” and “Love Me When I’m Gone”. The gallery’s main room showing Christine Wu exhibits new work and includes a hanging installation of broken dishes; symbolic of the frustration, satisfaction, and swift remorse gained from such a spontaneous action.
Linnea Strid’s new body of work in Thinkspace Gallery’s project room is a collection of artists who sent in their images submerged or drenched in water for Linnea to paint. A collaborative effort as Linnea did not direct the artists in how to take their photo, many of the artist she worked with on the pieces showed up for the opening. You can read more about her inspiration for the show in our interview with the artist.
Both exhibitions will be on view till February 20th, please visit the Thinkspace Gallery website for additional details.
Aaron Nagel’s work is concurrently on view in the Thinkspace office. He was surprised to have come to the show for Linnea and Christine, and find he had his own mini-exhibit in our office. You can view additional photos from the night on our Flickr account and Facebook page.
PRESS + Additional Photos
Arrested Motion: Linnea Strid – “Love Me When I’m Gone”
In just a few hours Christine Wu’s “Sleepless” opens at Thinkspace Gallery. A solo exhibition in Thinkspace Gallery’s main room, Christine Wu’s latest body of work is one part a love letter and second explores all the things that keep you up at night – real and imaginary. Visit Juxtapoz.com for a preview of the show and artistic background of Christine Wu.
“Known for her subtle tonal palettes, and exquisitely precise line work, Wu’s new works are darker and more muted than her previous. This aesthetic shift is Intended to capture a feeling of isolation and emotional strain,” – Juxtapoz.com
Christine Wu‘s latest exhibition “Sleepless” will be taking over the main room of Thinkspace Gallery in just a few weeks. “Sleepless” will open January 23rd and run till February 20th, showing all new work from the New York-based painter. We pulled a few shots of works in progress from her Instagram to give you a sense of the pieces that will be on view. Please visit her Instagram account to scroll through more!
Thinkspace is pleased to present Sleepless, the gallery’s first major solo exhibition of new works by New York City-based painter Christine Wu. A figurative oil painter who explores the expressive and emotive possibilities of the body, Wu delves into the vulnerability of self and the haunted nature of human consciousness. Her evocative and sensual depictions explore themes such as nostalgia and metaphysical becoming, expressing ephemeral states through physical manifestations of subjectivity. Wu incorporates abstract gestures into her works, often dissolving edges and contours to conflate environments and disrupt the representation of bodies, splintering and splitting the cohesion of an illusory whole in favor of a more experientially realistic incoherence. These moments of abstraction, however, are always in service of form and figure. Wu is fascinated by the cyclical momentum of growth and decay, and by the literal and metaphoric complicity of life and death. Her paintings capture this ambivalence, revealing the ghostly remnants of a divided subject through symbolic figurative instability, redoubling and flux.
Wu is interested in memory as a subjective construct; a mutable and fractured consciousness that is defined by sensorial experience and recall. Stylistically, she expresses this intangible feeling of disjointedness through multiple vantage points, or moments, captured in a single temporal frame, not unlike double-exposure photography. This unhinging of linear time captures the conflict of divisive psychological states. As the title of the exhibition suggests, Sleepless invokes the disturbances of night, both real and imagined, and the suspended unrest or “world-weariness,” in the artist’s own words, that arrests the subject’s release into sleep. As with previous works, Wu’s new paintings are sensual corporeal excavations of a vulnerable and imperfect self, grappling with the interminable process of self-realization.
Known for her subtle tonal palettes, and exquisitely precise line work, Wu’s new works are darker and more muted than her previous. This aesthetic shift is Intended to capture a feeling of isolation and emotional strain, in keeping with the exhibition’s theme of nocturnal restlessness. Her subjects are women created from a woman’s perspective; conflicted, complex, sensual, wounded and ambivalent, rather than reductively fetishized. Wu is in search of raw emotional experience rather than caricature, expressed through the vicissitudes of the physical body. Formally, the new works explore texture and tactility in new ways, inciting a physical reaction and desire to touch, a desire offset by its implicit prohibition.
In Sleepless, Wu continues to stage these tensions between the intimate and private, the public and exposed. There is a quiet and understated, though undeniable, intensity to the glimpses of interior life the artist selectively reveals. Through her unique take on figurative expressionism, Wu’s visceral paintings remind us of the fragility, and resilience, of the human psyche, and of the unavoidable erosion and deterioration of all external and impermanent things. Wu’s splintered bodies in breach seem to suggest that the individual’s personal growth is inextricably bound to a series of imposed and elective deaths; a constant process of undoing and becoming, remembering and forgetting.
Christine Wu – Sleepless
January 23 – February 20, 2016
Opening Saturday, January 23, 6-9pm
Detail shot of a work in progress from “Sleepless”
