J.A Feng
J.A Feng
Home Bodies
May 3 – June 15, 2024
1 Rivington St, New York
CANDICE MADEY is excited to announce the gallery’s first solo exhibition by New York–based artist J.A Feng, Home Bodies, in its 1 Rivington Street location. The exhibition presents a new series of oil paintings that continue Feng’s exploration of cycles of creation, decay, and regeneration through imagery of mutation and change.
Feng’s dominant subject matter evokes the corporeal; however, the human and nonhuman bodies in her paintings are transfigured by terrestrial and fantastical elements, imbuing the work with a supernatural charge. A narrative element permeates the overall exhibition, suggesting that momentous change is taking place, while individual works often offer multiple views of a single event—representing interior and exterior, subterranean and celestial, or material and illusory perspectives.
The surfaces of Feng’s paintings are thickly layered with a copious amount of undiluted oil paint, saturating natural palettes to synthetic extremes. The handling of light and space evokes both gothic and sublime sensibilities—an emotional tenor that also applies to her subject matter.
Feng, like many of her artistic and literary peers, is interested in rescripting dominant mythologies from a feminist perspective, exploring the powerful potential of reclaiming the stories that define community and enrich humanity’s underlying characteristics. In Home Bodies, she creates psychological spaces that embrace porousness, vulnerability, transmutation, and change as a potential worldview—or alternative universe altogether.
J.A Feng (b. 1982, Champaign, IL) received her MFA from Boston University in 2015 and was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include 12.26, Dallas, TX (2023, 2020) and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022). Recent group exhibitions include DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Harkawik, New York, NY (2022); Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN (2022); and North Loop, Williamstown, MA (2022). In 2021, Feng was artist in residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY. Feng has also received fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts (2021), Shandaken Paint School (2020), and NARS Foundation (2017). Feng currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
—