Andrew Kuo
'Attachments'
Andrew Kuo’s paintings ask: “How does art communicate meaning, emotion, experience, and shared understanding?” Not literally, of course. We all know that paintings can’t talk. Rather, this New York–based artist uses a variety of formal techniques to convey his generous worldview in paint on canvas. In his chart paintings, Kuo subverts our expectations of how information is visualized graphically with a colorful boldness and nuanced optical effects that transform data into complex abstractions. The works’ careful organization can be unlocked by a key below, allowing us to interpret the artist’s earnest ordering of the smallest details of his wide-ranging interests and the most intricate emotions of his life. In Attachments, these works are complemented by Kuo’s letterhead paintings, which feature a much looser application of paint on stationery backgrounds suggesting a range of evocative references. Their gestural lightness offers a different expression of meaning, highlighting a dialogue in the artist’s work between precision and freedom, color and form, as well as rational and irrational. Altogether, Kuo invites us into his world and encourages us to ask ourselves how we feel too.
Andrew Kuo’s paintings ask: “How does art communicate meaning, emotion, experience, and shared understanding?” Not literally, of course. We all know that paintings can’t talk. Rather, this New York–based artist uses a variety of formal techniques to convey his generous worldview in paint on canvas. In his chart paintings, Kuo subverts our expectations of how information is visualized graphically with a colorful boldness and nuanced optical effects that transform data into complex abstractions. The works’ careful organization can be unlocked by a key below, allowing us to interpret the artist’s earnest ordering of the smallest details of his wide-ranging interests and the most intricate emotions of his life. In Attachments, these works are complemented by Kuo’s letterhead paintings, which feature a much looser application of paint on stationery backgrounds suggesting a range of evocative references. Their gestural lightness offers a different expression of meaning, highlighting a dialogue in the artist’s work between precision and freedom, color and form, as well as rational and irrational. Altogether, Kuo invites us into his world and encourages us to ask ourselves how we feel too.
About the artist
Andrew Kuo (b. 1977, Queens, New York; lives and works in New York) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work across painting and sculpture often presents personal narratives to expand on the potential of both hard-edged and expressionist abstraction. Kuo has had numerous solo exhibitions with Broadway Gallery in New York and Tanya Leighton in Los Angeles, as well as previously in New York at Taxter & Spengemann and Marlborough Gallery. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions with Public Art Fund, New York (2020); Artists Space, New York (2005); the International Print Center, New York (2019); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn. (2015); the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice (2019); the Asia Song Society, New York (2011); the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Ariz. (2011); and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2011), among others. He is the host of Cookies Hoops basketball and culture podcast, a regular contributor to T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and the co-author of The Joy of Basketball: An Encyclopedia of the Modern Game.
Credits
Attachments is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer.
