Opening Reception: Yangyang Pan: Down the Rabbit Hole
Where: Madelyn Jordon Fine Art
37 Popham Road
Price: Free
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Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is pleased to present a second solo exhibition of paintings by Yangyang Pan entitled Down the Rabbit Hole from May 9 – June 21, 2014. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2012. An opening reception will be held Friday, May 9, 2014 from 6-8PM. The public is invited. Previews and private showings are by appointment only.
On exhibit will be 11 paintings, completed in the past year, which highlight Pan’s spontaneous, lyrical approach to painting. The exhibition title, “Down the Rabbit Hole” serves as a metaphor for Pan’s working process and personal existential journey inward in the creation of the works. Similarly, the title refers to historical artistic sources which have influenced Pan’s celebratory style. Both provide a foundation for Pan’s reinterpretation of action painting, fueled by youthful optimism, a cross-cultural history and outsized talent.
Like Alice in Wonderland following the March Hare down the rabbit hole, Pan jumps into her painting feet first without looking in the hole or thinking about it. According to Pan, her paintings begin with openness– a space to explore conceptual ideas of memory, experience and emotion. A hands-on painter, she works intuitively, freely applying vigorous flurries of rapid brushstrokes of varying shapes and intensity. Color patches are added or taken away, a self-imposed game explored through shapes, marks and colors, which organize the space of the canvas. At times her canvases are packed to the rafters with linear strokes; at other times, softer dabs of energetic colors float within fields of negative space. Canvases of raw linen, a new surface for Pan, accentuate depth, evoking a sense of deep physical space.
Channeling de Kooning, and Mitchell, Pan’s fierce, unabashed, joyful color palette evokes powerful emotional responses. Unapologetically ecstatic visions of nature’s flora are rendered with both guts and grace—evoking a personal style which seeks honesty, openness and pleasure.
Unlike the Abstract Expressionist artists of the mid- 20th century, who communicated the uncertainty and fear of a post World War II nuclear world, Pan’s abstract painting evokes an idealistic, optimistic, global view.
A link between Eastern and Western sensibilities, her works are successful for the subtle way she changes ab-ex tradition, and is emblematic of painting in the 21st century.
Yangyang Pan was born in 1976 in China. She received her BFA and MFA from the Sichuan Fine Art Institute in Chongqing, China, where she later taught. In 2006, she relocated to Canada with her husband and children. She has exhibited both in Canada, and the United States.
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