2018 - Art Expo, New York

2018 - Art Market &Design, Bridgehampton

2018 - Chase Edwards Contemporary, Bridgehampton

GEORGE TUN SEIN

Painting regularly in New York now for nearly two decades, George Tun Sein has perfected a practice that is both lyrical and constructive, one replete with light, color, and gesture, while all apparent, if abstract “content” is fixed securely in steadfast geometric compositions. This is no minor feat when most painters choose one or the other mode of working, as though both qualities, the lyrical and the constructive, implied visual and tactile sensibilities that were mutually exclusive.

Tun Sein is, in other words, gloriously unclassifiable—perhaps the highest form of critical appraisal as one sets aside all references to other, whether historical or contemporary, in order to revel in work that calls for its own kind of cognitive reflection.

This is a learned artist who knows how to unlearn his sources; an informed, lifelong student of art history who knows the necessity of forgetting all studied narratives; a connoisseur of the momentary, the chance, or “found” experience who knows how to recollect a visual impression smartly without ever romanticizing it.

In each canvas, countless world histories seem to converge and compact themselves into discrete gems of retinal ecstasy, where the modest labor of painting is a precious residue of the most intense authorship. Color, light, form, texture, line and abstract inscription all converge and register, in real time, the “contemporary,” just as one thinks the moment perceived is already lost to oblivion. What more is a masterful visual poem, than that perpetually contingent, yet epic construction?

—Gregory Galligan, Ph.D. Independent Curator

Contributing Editor, ArtAsiaPacific

all images copyright George Tun Sein 2013

1999 Gesamtpolnische Pastellbiennale, Poland

2004 - 2008 Annual Small Works Exhibition,Washington Square East Galleries, New York

2011 Gradual Rhapsody,Tally Beck Contemporary, New York

ArtMRKT, Hamptons

Texas Contemporary Art Fair, Houston, Texas

Art Asia, Miami

2012 ArtMRKT, San Francisco

ArtMRKT, Hamptons

Collections: Private/ International