Andrew Kuo

Tanya Leighton Gallery is pleased to present TMI, the first Los Angeles solo exhibition by New York artist Andrew Kuo.

Born in New York and raised by a dissident Taiwanese writer father and art historian mother, Kuo has lived an uncommon existence that melds an immigrant narrative, an intellectual milieu, and a passion for American culture and its discontents.

Kuo’s paintings combine an omnivorous appetite for data with a highly refined graphic sense and a sneakily complex chromatic approach. He harnesses statistical syntax in the cause of emotional exploration, repurposing quantitative tools in the form of programmatic charts that make sly reference to the Modernist canon. In this sense, his works are not abstractions but instead are crammed with complex information that is detailed in a key that sits at the bottom of the painting. The text showcases Kuo’s knack for concise, Tweet-length expressions that distill moments as quotidian as waiting for a friend or as heavy as the death of a parent.

In TMI, Kuo has executed a new suite of chart paintings. Some are made in the form of a book, doubled back at the spine forming a dimensional timeline (“then/ now; today/tomorrow”) and others in homage to the rigorous colour explorations of Josef Albers, which are retrofitted here as indexical infographics (“in my mind/ in reality”).

As a counterpoint, Kuo has also included a group of loose, brushy abstractions referencing Monet’s late paintings. Sharing a palette, proportions and text subtitles with the chart paintings, these works invoke an inverse reading and provide a further quotational notion of “abstraction”. Taken together, they begin to formulate a personalized narrative as seen through the lenses of art history, race, politics, music, design and the internet.

Andrew Kuo (born in 1977 in Queens, NY) is a NYC-based artist known for his data-informed abstractions. A recent participant in NYC’s citywide initiative, ‘Art on the Grid’, awarded by the Public Art Fund, in 2020, Kuo has held solo exhibitions at Marlborough Contemporary, London, 2018; Green Gallery, Milwaukee, 2017; Marlborough Chelsea, NY, 2016; and Galeria Marabini, Bologna, 2012. His other recent exhibitions include ‘Why I Make Art’ curated by Brian Alfred, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, 2022; ‘Ten Years’, Halsey McKay, 2021; ‘Heterotopia I’, curated by Gea Politi, The Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, Italy; and ‘Something Green’, Reyes Projects, Birmingham, Michigan among others.

With special thanks to Broadway, New York for making this exhibition possible.