Jupiter is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Yirui Jia at the tenth anniversary of Expo Chicago. Within Jia’s work resides a cast of characters—many of whom are derived from popular culture and cartoon influences to anthropomorphic objects and animals. Each character has its own complex identity within the childlike worlds in which they are portrayed, empowered by the reinvention of the ordinary. Jia embraces the idea of her paintings serving as visualized narratives to the sculptures and vice-versa. The first of her family to become an artist, Jia is inspired by daily life—the personal and shared experiences, “the undifferentiated universality of objects,” and, perhaps most importantly, the humor of it all. Building upon her characteristic style that fuses a sense of whimsey and play with comedic wit and energized expressionism, Jia’s newest paintings take a turn towards greater abstraction.
While much of her previous work featured a Quentin Tarantino-inspired bride with an eye patch and flaming orange hair—who represented a wildly misbehaved version of a classic female stereotype—careening through the artist’s cinematic universe, Jia’s more recent paintings have moved away from such narrative compositions to expand the identities and complexities of the characters depicted therein. The figures that emerge within the works on view may similarly represent a fearless woman in her own universe, but instead of channeling this energy solely through the eye-patch adorned protagonist of her former works, Jia’s figures now take off the eye-patch, open their eyes, and assume a multitude of forms, raging widely from an astronaut, a swimmer, and a pilot to an Egyptian pharaoh.
