For Immediate Release
giving way
paintings for london
angela lyn
curated by max koss
the gallery in cork street
5 september to 15 september 2012, 11am to 7pm daily
opening reception tuesday, 4 september 2012, 6 to 9pm
Curated by Max Koss, giving way is a selection of recent paintings, in particular a series
of Angela Lyn’s signature large-scale landscapes, which present a unique fusion of
western and eastern traditions. In this show, Lyn claims painting’s continued relevance
by putting forth a poetics of painting standing in radical contrast to the totalizing claims
of the ever faster, technologized image culture of urban life. Her work guides its viewers
into a sensuous dialogue with urban life’s juxtapositions and fragility through a journey
of introspective reflection and caring serenity.
The work on view extends Lyn’s exploration of the relationship between time, place and
subjectivity but also reveals the fragility of the process of painting and productively
engages its inherent instabilities. Lyn’s landscapes, worked from photographs taken in
the artist’s immediate surroundings in Ticino, Switzerland, transcend the local and
suggest a universal topography. Marco Franciolli, Director of Art Museums in Lugano,
where Lyn lives and works, has said about her landscapes: “One recalls the myth of the
romantic landscape. However, it is precisely within this subtle equilibrium [of focus and
openness], between the infinite of nature, as suggested in the landscape, and an
anchorage to the earthly, as articulated in the careful attention to detail, that Angela Lyn
manifests her contemporary sensibility.”
Lyn’s labor-intensive images are built by thin layers of oil paint superimposed on each
other, with the lighter colors being applied first, and darker tones added subsequently.
This technique allows her to create remarkable effects of light and luminosity, creating
a strong sense of expansiveness, which stands in marked contrast to the otherwise flat
appearance of the painted surface. It is the tension between the minute brushstrokes
and the veil-like nature of the finished paintings that brings to the fore Lyn’s quest for an
almost minimal, yet metaphysical painting.
The same generosity with which Lyn imbues the landscapes, she also invests in the
other canvases in the show, in which she zooms in on details, be they small
assemblies of objects or parts of trees. Here Lyn embraces a more open yet subtly
cautious figurative mode, and her titles hint at the storylines behind her work.
Throughout, Lyn keeps the figurative and the abstract, the lyrical and the metaphysical in
play with each other so as to create new images out of the ambiguities inherent in her
ongoing exploration of painterly possibilities. Indeed, Angela Lyn has been investigating
the thresholds of her medium as perhaps no other painter of her generation in her quest
to use her work as a space of dialogue between oppositions and finding of the self.
Angela Lyn was born in Windsor, England in 1955 to a Chinese father and an English
mother. In 1968 she emigrated with her family to the USA. In 1972 she travelled to
Taiwan to explore her Asian heritage, pursuing studies in Chinese language and
painting at Fu-Jen University in Taipei. Later, returning to England, she studied Fine Art at
Southampton College of Art and Byam Shaw School of Painting, London. In 1978 she
moved to Switzerland and attended the Master Class in painting, led by Franz Fedier at
the Kunstgewerbeschule, Basel. She is the mother of three children and presently lives
and works in Lugano, Switzerland. Her works can be found in corporate, private and
museum collections across Europe, Russia and the USA.
Max Koss was born in 1982 in Berlin. A student of the Humanities and Social Sciences,
he has lived in Berlin, Paris, and London, where he graduated from the LSE and the
Courtauld Institute of Art. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Art History at the
University of Chicago. He is a scholar of modern European art, and has written essays
ranging from German Romanticism to the work of Gerhard Richter. He has been
following Angela Lyn’s work for many years, and is a regular contributor to her
catalogues.
A catalogue featuring a text by Max Koss will accompany the gallery exhibition.
Contact
Before and after the exhibition
info@angelalyn.net
www.angelalyn.net
T +41 79 685 5905
maxkoss@me.com
PR Victoria Cadogan Rawlinson: victoriarawlinson@gmail.com T+44 07775521800
During the show
T +44 20 7437 2812
M +44 7906 060352
giving way
paintings for london
angela lyn
curated by max koss
5 september to 15 september 2012
opening reception
11am to 7pm daily or by appointment
tuesday 4 september 2012
the gallery in cork street
6pm to 9pm
28 cork street london w1s 3ng
contact
info@angelalyn.net
www.angelalyn.net
