Xinyi Cheng

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Xinyi Cheng. This is the artist’s first one-person exhibition in the United States and includes 16 paintings.

Cheng’s paintings, with their unexpected color and compositions, often begin with her own observations, whether an interaction she witnessed or an image from a film that lingered in her mind. Her subjects, which often include strangers, friends, animals, or still lifes, convey a wide range of emotions and sensations including intimacy, alienation, peacefulness, or unease. In Cheng’s words, “My paintings are about different aspects of desire and human relationships. I paint situations that are based on my memories or imagination.”

The works in the exhibition range in scale and format from the small Nude Girl with Gloves, Otto Dix (2022), an intimate depiction of Cheng’s cat sitting atop an art catalogue under the night sky, to the large Midday Troubles (2021), in which two figures appear in repose floating against a pale background. Equally wide-ranging are the reference points in her work, which include Japanese woodblock prints, a painting by Tiepolo, and a telephone seen hanging in a hallway of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Xinyi Cheng (b. 1989, Wuhan, China) lives and works in Paris. Her work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, and included in numerous group exhibitions, among them the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai; and the Bourse de Commerce, Paris.