Yuri Yuan: "The Great Swimmer"

"The Great Swimmer," is the artist’s first monograph celebrating her West Coast debut exhibition. The catalog features a comprehensive interview between Yuan and artist Sarah Sze, as well as an incisive and ekphrastic introduction by the poet and critic John Yau, a work of art in its own right. 

"The Great Swimmer" marks a watershed moment in Yuan’s practice, incorporating influences of cinema and modernist literature into her established and highly accomplished figural palette.The exhibition presents a narrative in two sets of fragments, hopping between visions of the internal and external, the literary and the cinematic, the real and the dream. Yuan's canvases– in their internal meditations of memory, isolation, and selfhood– lay the foundational anxieties of modern existence bare to the bone.