Yuan Fang

In Dark Forest (2023), Yuan Fang creates a dense, interwoven network of swirling forms and luminous layers of colour. Turquoise, pink, red, green and purple contrast with darker areas and generate a dynamic tension between depth and movement. The abstract composition appears at once organic and physical: the flowing lines are reminiscent of muscles, plants, waves and currents and cause the pictorial space to appear in constant motion.

Yuan Fang was born in 1996 in Shenzhen, China, and lives and works in New York. Her large-scale, entirely abstract paintings take shape intuitively and without preparatory sketches. The artist builds up her compositions layer by layer, adding, reworking and removing paint, whereby she allows room for chance and unexpected discoveries. Her characteristic swirls and curving brushstrokes marry notions of the body, landscape, space and time.

In Dark Forest, this painterly idiom becomes directly palpable. The intertwining forms seem to simultaneously express growth and disintegration, energy and resistance. Echoes of the human body combine in the flowing lines with a multilayered emotional expressiveness. Fang’s painting thus becomes an exploration of the human experience and of the tension between inner sensibility and outer world.

Acrylic on canvas
170 x 221cm

Provenance: donated by Leo Rogath and Price & Wooster