MAMOTH is delighted to announce the London debut of New York based artist, Suyi Xu (b.1996, Shanghai, China). Her exhibition will run from the 17th of May until the 22nd of June 2024.
Through a visual language of shapes, structures and the sublime, Suyi Xu creates a formal dialogue between forms of architecture and wonder in nature. The devotional structures of gates, cathedrals and cloisters hold intuitive, often mirrored, line and shade patterns resembling organic symmetry like butterflies or pinecones, shells or vulvas - references that run like a beam through the history of Western art and Eastern philosophies. Trained as an art historian at Barnard and then as a painter at SVA, the research behind the exhibition is deeply embedded in the tradition of painting. Suyi's fascination with light is rooted in the transcendent brushstrokes of Rembrandt and the Dutch school as well as the vernacular of mystic painters or the colour field movement. Shape and form emerge from the page, buttressed by pillars and other features. These elements are lifted from a variety of reference imagery often sourced from books held in large collections like Gemäldegalerie in Berlin or the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, institutions that are themselves fortresses of architecture and power. Raised as a strict atheist in Shanghai, Suyi is careful to suggest she does not adhere to any religious doctrine or institutional dogma, but that she is interested in what these have produced through harnessing belief, and how this manifests in a visual medium. The work of Proust, she explains, is not about religion, rebirth and resurrection, yet his writing has that as its spine. For Suyi, the search is for a form of 'grace' as described by Simone Weil—the grace present in a moment of awe and wonder on a rare spellbinding encounter with art, music or nature. These could be, and even feel like, paintings that might be used as tools to assist in achieving transcendence.
Vaulted ceilings in muted hues, subtly glowing spheres and geometric patterns all unfurl across Suyi's immaculate linen canvases. The space rendered by the artist draws on sacred geometry as forms become mandalas or lotuses in the subjective eye of the beholder, while the openings of arches become lids, lips, or gems. Suyi's washed-out palette gives a sense of the low-contrast, soft-focus, liminal state between dreaming and waking. The works are apparitions from the light of the mind's eye. The artist sees them as her unconscious realms, and recognises her process as echoing the dreamer's journey in an associative "dream-logic" arrived at through a chance-process. The images are seductive and calm: a reverent silence is embedded in the canvas, somehow an antidote to what she refers to as the chaos of New York. Suyi begins her day by intention setting and mental preparation as she walks to her Brooklyn studio. The artist seeks solace and solitude through the process of making. On arrival at the studio, she first sweeps the floor. In many cultures, sweeping is a physical gesture and metaphor for cleaning the mental debris away, making space for contemplation or trance. The previous day she will have turned her canvases away from her to face the wall. This glimpse, or reveal, first thing in the morning is the time she values most in the day: when she sees the canvases anew. Once she has observed them, she then warms up - as one might at the start of a run or a dance-training her hand and eye by beginning some simple sketches of reference imagery from art and architecture. Dropping into a flow state and a meditative process means that as she starts back on her canvas, she lets the white pencil glide across the primed linen, she is being guided by her focus and her hand rather than any preemptive composition. 'It is not pleasurable to forge your own drawings', she says. As a result, some of this presence and responsiveness seems to keep the compositions alive. Her perfection of ratio and balance is a natural by-product of the artist's process as she works through her 'projected psyche'.
The body of work is distinctive in its rendering of soft, silent worlds in which the figure is absent and yet hinted at in the bodily shapes and forms within the structures. The picture plane is foreground and background simultaneously. This interplay between spatial arrangements is particularly evident in The Room of Temperance, which—as with all balancing acts—is a mirror composition. At the centre, an entrance also becomes a protrusion. As with Magic Eye pictures or optical illusion silhouettes, if you soften your gaze enough two images can be seen at once. This trick-of-the-eye perceptual state also echoes the in-between. Through her work, Suyi combines the formal harmony of expertly honed painterly skill, with the ability to invite us into her world.
Press release courtesy MAMOTH, London. Text: Susanna Davies - Crook
3 Endsleigh Street
London, WC1H 0DS
United Kingdom
The gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
Wednesday – Saturday
11am – 6pm