Recognized for his exceptional painterly ability honed at a young age, Chris Oh could replicate any image into an astounding facsimile. Notions of appropriation and authorship may have contended in the visual realm from antiquity to the present day, copying as a form of learning has not only been common practice among artists' studios of the Renaissance Masters such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, but the burgeoning art and culture of this period itself, was rooted in rediscovering and learning from the classical cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Read MoreAppropriation has long been understood as one of the defining practices of modern art. This art of the copy, however, is not limited to that which came after the age of reproduction. The conscious duplication of preexisting artworks is as present in Warhol as it is in Ovid's reconfigurations of Virgil. The push and pull between homage and authorship is central to an artist forming their own language; and just as Rubens copied and contorted the work of Titian, Chris Oh co-opts masterpieces from the Western canon in order to forge his own singular oeuvre. Altogether, Oh's work is a resurrection of art history. To view these delicate paintings is to see the artist recall some of the most sublime reflections on 15th and 16th - century life and use them as mirrors through which to observe our own moment in time.
Chris Oh was born in 1982 in Portland, Oregon, and currently lives and works in Queens, New York.
Text by Ariella Wollens. Courtesy Capsule Shanghai.
