VSF announces Mark Yang’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and his second in our Los Angeles Space, Cryptic Aperture. In 2024 Yang began making paintings in pairs, not opposites or twins, but siblings and companions - compositions that emerge from a similar foundation and evolve into unique expressions of the same DNA. Yang’s signature figurative abstraction is on full display here, playing with deep and detailed looking at historical paintings and compositional strategies, Yang has built a body of work that arrives at an analysis of his understanding of the viewer’s perception of his own signature style.
Entropy (box), 2024 and Entropy (cylinder), 2024 make direct reference to a 1940 painting by Picasso, Woman Dressing Her Hair, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso’s painting is a portrait of Dora Maar, shown mostly from the front, her body tests the limits of the prescribed pictorial space, represented as an open-faced painted cube- a room, a stage. Her body, run through the metamorphosis of cubist perspective, twists to the right and is dramatically foreshortened, increasing the claustrophobic nature of the image. Rather than the languid awkwardness of the private toilette not performed for a male gaze, yet nonetheless observed and reveled in, by a painter like Dégas in his circa 1900 pastel, Women combing their hair, Picasso’s painting almost suggests the form of the body in motion locked inside a cube, like a sculpture yet to emerge from stone. Yang’s perspective (and many others’ as well) on Picasso’s work from this era is that the images reflect sculpture, or condensing what it is to look at three-dimensions in time into pictorial space - a sort of montage. In Yang’s pair of paintings, the palette and constraining cube of Woman Dressing Her Hair is repeated.
