Inner Rhyme-Jenny Chen Solo Exhibition
Double Square Gallery is delighted to present Inner Rhyme, a new solo exhibition by the New York-based artist Jenny Chen, on April 20, 2019. Chen is known for her free and vibrant abstract painting created with a highly recognizable, individualistic style. This first collaboration between the gallery and the artist is her most comprehensive exhibition in recent years. The exhibition title, Inner Rhyme, denotes an interplay of inner rhythm and rhyme. The works on view in the exhibition, mainly composed of orange, yellow, green and a few other others, are shown to the public for the first time, displaying an array of harmonized color landscape. Rita Chang Yuan-Chien, director of Asian Cultural Council Taiwan Foundation, is the curator of the exhibition and employs writing and spatial arrangement to guide the audience to appreciate and perceive the varying shades of colors as well as the abstract aesthetics embodied by Chen’s painting.
Chen has solely used abstract painting as a means for her artistic expression for over three decades, fusing splendid colors with vivid and textural layers to create canvases charged with personal feelings and life experiences. During her creative process, the artist never adopts any preconceived ideas but employs her mastery of physical movement and her use of media to create a fluent flow and layering of colors on the canvas. Her approach allows conflict, opposition, contradiction and struggle to surface in the structure during a rhythmic process of body movement and reveals the tremendous potentiality of layers and texture. The free-flowing colors or color blocks in her work are, in fact, results of elaborate experimentation and consideration, through which she has achieved a full balance in composition, color and material. Inner Rhyme features a fresh body of abstract paintings created with semi-automatic techniques. The artist uses a limited selection of intensely vibrant colors, smashing them into each other within the confines of the canvases. Like the curator has stated, “the images look like moments right before an explosion that would shatter or fragmentize everything; it is as if the colors were coagulating at this second but would soon be succeeded by something completely different and unexpected.” Chen has a unique understanding and grasp of color layering. Her longtime appreciation of music has led her to discover a resonance between abstract musical expression and painting. The poeticness, musicality, rhythm and sense of speed in Chen’s paintings fully express her spirit and life journey.
Jenny Chen was born in Chongqing, China in 1944. Currently living and working in New York, Chen graduated from the College of Liberal Arts, National Chengchi University in 1968, and received her MFA from Pratt Institute, New York in 1990. Since 1987, the artist has exhibited in numerous art institutions and galleries, including Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaundu Museum of Fine Arts, Shanghai Art Museum, Lincoln Center in New York, the Grand Palais in Paris, the 17th Asian International Art Exhibition, etc. Her works are included in the collections of Pratt Institute, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Shanghai Art Museum, etc.
Rita Chang Yuan-Chien is an experienced curator and art critic. She graduated from the Department of History, National Taiwan University in 1980, and received her MA in Art History from Kansas State University in 1982. She is now CEO of the Asian Cultural Council Taiwan Foundation, and has taught in Tamkang University, Chinese Culture University and Reitaku University in Japan. Chang has curated many epoch-making and representative exhibitions, among which are Very Fun Park Contemporary Art Exhibition in Taipei East District (2001 to present; toured in Australia and Hong Kong), Land Ethic— Fubon Landscape Art (1998) and Lord of the Rim: In Herself / For Herself (1997).
