New York-based artist Yirui Jia’s first solo exhibition in Australia at COMA Gallery features a fantastical world, one filled with colour and expression. The exhibition offers a bright yellow floor to capture the audience into the artist’s oeuvre – entirely enveloping the viewer in the art. On the walls, canvases of varying sizes feature vivid brushwork that connects to the physicality of Jia’s movement. The various scales of work are a tool used by the artist to recontextualise the world through a fracturing and distorting of time and space.
Yirui Jia, Inviting Me To Me, installation view, COMA, Sydney, 2022. Courtesy the artist and COMA, Sydney
“I see a painting as a play or theatre, and the figures being actors. Now I’m thinking not only about the narrative but the whole painting as a character itself. So it’s almost like each painting has its own personality – I’m pushing towards seeing the painting as a whole. Recently, I’ve tried starting as an abstract painting and then using that abstract-ness to search for clues on how to build a play from it,” says Jia.
In other perspectives of the exhibition, the artist adds heaping piles of everyday objects: a snickers bar, lightbulbs, bubble gum, cupping therapy; and a Nike sock – banal objects grounding the viewer in the reality of their own existence.
Courtesy the artist and COMA Gallery
COMA shares that Inviting Me To Me “allows for acts of introspection and moments of self-reflection that encourage the viewer to embrace their own inherent freedom. Through the channels that connect Yirui Jia’s varying worlds, we see limitless potential in a frenetic dreamscape that conjures puerile feelings that feed our insatiable appetite for life as both a superficial and authentic experience.”
COMA
13 January to 18 February 2023
Sydney
