The Oklahoma Nature Theater
November 8 — December 20, 2024
Opening Reception: November 8, 6pm - 8pm
New York: 64th Street
Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Brook Hsu. The 14 works in this show reflect an artist in transition. She nostalgically revisits past motifs while finding joy in experimenting with new ones. The leap from piece to piece is a nod to the exquisite corpse of narratives and the agency of stories.
“Who tells whose story?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” he replied. They were sitting high up on a ridge, overlooking the valley below to the West. It was early in the morning and the world was saturated with dew, vapor rising up breathily from the boggy areas surrounding the sharp bends in the river below. As if she hadn’t heard his reply, she continued, “Sometimes I wonder, how did I get here?”
“Well you’re here on this mountain with me,” he reassured her, turning her chin to look her in the eyes, “and there’s no where else in the world I’d rather be.”
—Amanda Schmitt
Installation
Work
Video
About
Photo by Ian Lewandowski
Brook Hsu (b. 1987) deploys and weaves the autobiographical and the mythopoetic into paintings using an array of materials, including ink, oil paint, industrial carpets, and off-cuts of ready-made lumber. The sources for Hsu’s imagery come from her own observations, sometimes arising from art history, film and literature. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and writing, her works aim to question how we define representation today, producing abstract and figurative works that employ a host of signs and motifs, recounting stories of love, pain and humor. Hsu says of her practice, ‘I seek to understand what we value in life by asking how we value the world.’
Brook Hsu lives and works in New York and Wyoming. Hsu received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include: Gladstone Gallery, New York (2024); Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2022); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2021); Manual Arts, Los Angeles (2021); Bortolami Gallery, New York (2019). Hsu has presented in group exhibitions at David Zwirner, New York (2024); Heidi Gallery, Berlin (2024); Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel (2024); Oriole, Hamburg (2024); Et al. Gallery, San Francisco (2024); New York (2024); 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023); K11 Shanghai (2023); Kunsthalle Zürich (2023); Paul Soto, Los Angeles (2023); Adler Beatty, New York (2022); Derosia Gallery, New York (2022); Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2022); kaufmann repetto, New York and Milan (2021); TANK, Shanghai (2020); CLEARING, New York (2020); Jan Kaps, Cologne (2020); Insect Gallery, Los Angeles (2019-2020); Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2019); in lieu, Los Angeles (2019); and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2018-2019).
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