Faye Wei Wei: New Works

About

Recently graduated from Slade School of Fine Art in 2016, 23 year old Faye Wei Wei is a young painter whose passion and energy has earned her considerable attention in the public eye. Faye's large-scale figurative artworks draw you into an imaginative, painterly world that brings together symbolism, mystery and mythology. Wei Wei sees her mark-making as the record of vast sequences of gesture and movement. Her painting has a sense of enjoyment, revelling in the beauty of the unassuming and unexpected.

This brand new collection of art work, marks a development in Wei Wei's artistic practice, with experiments in unorthodox colour palettes which complement her characteristically bold and swooping brush strokes. The imagery continues to be about texture, physicality and the pleasure of representation as the actual subject-matter in itself.

In its interplay of detail and spaciousness, Wei Wei's work is acutely aware of the way more than one space can exist at the same time. Along with figures who rest on the plane nearest to the viewer, her compositions are populated by an array of unexpected objects often inspired by real-life discoveries by the artist. Sea urchins, luxurious and repellent, fuse abrasiveness with a suggestion of tender sensuality. A dog-shaped puppet, found in Manhattan's Chinatown, is draped around the shoulders of a figure. A merman derived from an old box of matches fills in for the 'Fisher King', alluding to the fertility myth cited by T.S. Eliot in his notes to The Waste Land.

This exhibition in Gallery 2, runs alongside a solo show of video works by artist Shen Xin including a new commission. Both shows are curated by Tiffany Leung.