Yuz Project Space of Art
Math Bass: Serpentine Door

Yuz Museum, West Bund Shanghai
June 24 – August 27, 2017

“I’m interested in how an object can become an image of itself, and in how an image can inform an object. We are constantly negotiating our movements through space, and performing towards and around other bodies and objects. I am looking to find moments where the body appears and disappears, when it cannot be certain what is underneath.” —— Math Bass

 

《布鲁明戴尔百货店》,布面水粉
Bloomingdale’s, gouache on canvas
132.1 × 381 cm,2016
 

Yuz Museum is glad to present the Yuz Project Space of Art exhibition of Math Bass “Serpentine Door” from June 24th to August 27th, 2017, the artist’s first solo exhibition in China. Eighteen pieces of her recent paintings and sculptures will be exhibited in the gallery, illustrating a visual space with her unique symbols and colors.

During her artistic exploration, Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass has been building a body of crisp and highly stylized artworks and language system. Painting on raw canvas, she presents an assortment of recognizable objects (fire, smoke, alligators, matchsticks, letters) and simple geometric shapes (circles, zigzags) by using bright even colors and sharpened edges, leaving strong instant impression which continues to resonate visually, and creating moments of perverse tension. The familiarity of these forms is offset by the conflation of themselves and the ambiguity of their relations, impelling us to rethink our perception and relation to things around us.

 

《“新闻!”》,布面水粉
“Newz!”, gouache on canvas
121.9 × 116.8 cm,2016
 

In this exhibition, Bass not only engages with familiar symbols from the ongoing “Newz!” series, featuring her constant focus on information and communication, but also creates new forms drawn from her experience in Shanghai. While doing a site visit to Yuz Museum last year, Bass took a trip to Yu Garden where she encountered with a series of doorway, which was intended to frame out one’s viewing experience of the Garden. She incorporated the silhouette of the doorway in a diptych titled “Serpentine Door”, showing her strong interest in frames, thresholds, vantage points, and positive and negative space. The four large paintings that are specially made for the glass atrium are also inspired by the idea of multiple vantage points in the museum space, hung back to back as two images sharing across four separate planes, which are endowed with different functions. One side deals with a grid of symbols that act as a ledger to become familiar with the lexicon before entering into the main exhibition space, where as the counter side, aminimal landscape with the binary symbols for A and B, can be read from outside of the museum through the window.

 

《蜿蜒之门》,布面水粉
Serpentine Door, gouache on canvas
182.9 × 91.4 cm,2017
**** 以上所有图片由艺术家及洛杉矶Overduin & Co.画廊提供
All image: courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
 

The lexicon of images in Bass’s paintings becomes a theatre of symbols, continually shifting and repeating, which addresses image production and consumption through a language that may suggest the viewers to “read” the paintings.
 

About the Artist

Born in New York in 1981, Math Bass received a BA from Hampshire College, Amherst in 2003 and an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in the year of 2011. The Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass began her career primarily as a performance artist, but she has since expanded her practice to include painting, sculpture, and video. Bass has exhibited her work internationally, her solo exhibitions include: “Over the Top,” Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, 2017; “Bloomies,” Michael Jon and Alan, Miami Beach, 2016; “Off the Clock,” MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2015; “Lies Inside,” Overduin & Co., Los Angeles, 2014; “Newz!,” Michael Jon Gallery, Miami, 2013; “Pass the Line,” UCLA, Los Angeles, 2011, and etc. Group exhibitions include: “Los Angeles – A Fiction,” Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway, 2016; “OVERPOP,” Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, 2016; “Bring Your Own Body,” Cooper Union, New York, NY, 2015; “Drawing Biennial 2015,” The Drawing Room, London, UK, 2015; “B.B.S.Q.,” Wallspace, New York, 2013; “Made in L.A.,” The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2012, and etc.
 

About Yuz Project Space of Art

Yuz Project Space of Art is a new independent program of Yuz Museum’s exhibitions, which opened to the public in September 2015. Yuz Project Space of Art invites artists to make site-specific works or projects, engaging boldly with the museum, its surroundings and its audience. Combining “a project + an exhibition”, the artist interacts actively with the space and aims to present the moment when contemporary art is happening.

Yuz Project Space of Art is the place where innovation, invention, and a new movement happen in the pathway of an artist. It aims to provide another platform for Chinese and international artists to exhibit their artworks as well as more opportunities to communicate with each other. Yuz Project Space of Art invites the artist to get inspired with new ideas by engaging the artist with the museum space and try to make some break-through artworks that are different from his own line.