Minh-Lan Tran

Francis Irv is pleased to present Minh-Lan Tran’s Devotion Disorder, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in New York.

Invisible presences tug us this way and that, luring us one way and regularly deflecting us onto different paths, but seldom are they described. Minh Lan Tran works to give form to such presences in order to lay them to rest. Using egg, pigment, and chalk, the artist crafts her own paint in a process borrowed from traditional techniques used for early Byzantine icon paintings—an era in which theories of the image and the ethics of representing the divine began to be negotiated. She then breaks the methods apart as she shreds, burns, and battles her surfaces that look like the slits of a veil. Tran's titles suggest innards and fault lines on the body, the matter that arises after cataclysmic disruptions fissure the mind. Engaging in a politics of utterance, the artist aims to restore a power to signify, and give birth to an expression of experience by experience. She listens for the divine utterance that she seeks to make manifest, flirting with the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the image and the spirit that experiences of the visible world disclose. If consciousness is a shield against the wound that constitutes desire and being, this lack is beyond anything which can represent it; it is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil.

Minh-Lan Tran (b. 1997, Hong Kong) lives and works in Paris. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Parliament, Paris (2024); Jan Kaps, Cologne (2023); Harlesdon High Street, London (2023); and a performance at Sadie Coles, London (2023). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Balice Hertling, Paris (2024); High Art, Seoul (2024); François Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2024); Francis Irv, New York (2024); Museum of the Home, London (2023); Jan Kaps, Cologne (2023); House, Berlin (2023); and Roman Road, London (2023). Tran graduated from Courtauld Institute (MA Byzantine Studies) in 2020 and Royal College of Art (MA Painting) in 2023.