ANH DUONG

Duong’s work belongs to public collections including the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.) and the Statue of Liberty Museum, New York, which commissioned Duong’s 50 sculpted stars for the new museum entrance in 2019. Duong’s work also belongs to illustrious private collections, including filmmakers, artists, architects and designers ranging from Dennis Hopper to Bruno Bischofberger, Spyros Niarchos, Simon de Pury, Patrick Painter, and Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. Duong has gained widespread acclaim for her singular portraits, painting the likeness of Vincent Gallo, Susan Sarandon, Anjelica Huston, Karen Elson, Christian Louboutin. A number of these portraits are on display in Galerie Gmurzynska’s new show, which spans the breadth of Duong’s portraiture.

There is a characteristic fleshiness to Duong’s portraits—a crisp fleshiness, distinct from the Neo-Expressionist thickets of Jenny Saville’s brushwork and the flat roseate nudes of Maureen Dougherty’s sprightly fêtes galantes. Duong’s paintings are executed in veristic style and uncompromisingly theatrical in substance; they are tethered to an elliptical world striped with narratives that we only catch glimpses at. There is a cinematic quality to Duong’s use of light and her composition, her splinter-scenes rife with narratives attested to by her titles (e.g., Apres la Dispute (After the fight), 2006; The Gentlewoman or the Aggravation of our Incoherences, 2022; Between Epicureanism and Stoicism, 2022). More often than not, Duong’s subjects are women. Though they might flaunt the vaudeville garb of an 18th century empresses donned in russet-curled wigs and half-sheeted in knight’s armour, as in The Impossible Gender Frontiers (2022), Duong’s women are palpably real and contemporary. They are real in their playful attire, dressing for themselves alone, and they are real in how lamplight or the sun’s rays bounce between the furrows of their skin, revealing pocks and ridges. Duong’s likeness is thoroughgoing, the artist’s most consistent motif amidst changes in proportion, setting, and age. Such is the confessional nature of Duong’s oeuvre, which oscillates between portraiture, self-portraiture, and still life’s of resplendent plants, bejewelled pumps, and shrivelled paint tubes, their contents exhausted.