giving way paintings for london 2012

The delicate paintings of the Anglo-Chinese artist Angela Lyn offer respite from the haste of our lives, reconnecting us with the ethereal essence of human experience. In her new series Giving Way, Lyn aligns large primordial landscapes with still life painting reflecting fragile interludes of everyday life. Mixing the transcendental with the specific, her work leads us to discover the dialogue within us in an experience that is at once kind and powerful. Her differentiated language as a painter, her close observation and quiet insistence, gratify the viewer with a sense of renewal.
Max Koss is a scholar and curator. He was educated at the London School of Economics, the Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at the University of Chicago. Koss has been following Lyn’s work closely since 2005 and is a major contributor to her numerous publications.

At once, upon entering the gallery from the street, with its myriad of city noises, you are mystified by the uncanny quietness of the paintings. You sense their presence, a low murmuring emanating from the walls.

A number of years ago, when I first came upon Angela Lyn’s paintings, I understood her paintings to be a distant echo of the romantic landscape tradition infused with a distinct modernist inflection. They were, and still are, paintings about the act of painting itself, pointing as much to the world outside, as … read more