Artist Shangkai Kevin Yu explores our relationships with objects in this series of large-scale oil paintings. In striking detail, he constructs several settings of an imagined, fictional home—each work pairs household items, painted from memory, with specific art historical references, ranging from nineteenth-century European portraiture to classic American masterpieces.
Treating the still life as portraiture, Yu examines form as a narrative device from various periods of art history; taking structural and compositional cues from old master paintings and applying them to newly placed subjects, all lived-with objects from the artist's life. This piece refers to an all-brick former cotton factory where Yu spent his residency in Leipzig, Germany. Loosely based on Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 painting American Gothic, Yu places the broom and mop from his residency studio in the original couple’s stead.
Shangkai Kevin Yu, b. Taiwan, lives and works in New York. Yu spent his childhood in Taiwan and Vancouver and later moved to New York, earning his BFA at Parsons School of Design and MFA at New York Academy of Art. He has participated in residencies with the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany.
Oil on linen over panel
Unique
