With Yuri Yuan's solo show just opened at Make Room in Los Angeles, we take a look at her works from the past year in today's A Portfolio. The works have a stunning sense of atmosphere, taking you into a moment with a hazy quiet.
Yuri Yuan (b. 1996) was born in Harbin, China and raised in Singapore. She has received a BFA from Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from Columbia University. The Critic John Yau has described Yuan’s paintings as “understated, but… signal[ing] a significant shift in consciousness.” Yuan takes as subject the everyday, capturing a mundanity and emptiness in even the most surreal scenes. Her delicate palette emphasizes a fundamental emptiness of the modern condition, a loneliness that follows her female protagonists from the city to the countryside, from reality into dream. By emphasizing the unexplainable, Yuan’s works represent a new, achingly contemporary sea change for figurative painting.
