NEW YORK, NY.- Laurel Gitlen announces Fata Morgana, the first New York solo exhibition of paintings by You Ni Chae, on view from November 5 - December 17, 2022.
 
You Ni Chae makes intimately-scaled paintings where diffuse and layered pigment register subtle shapes and oscillating patches of light, suggesting the possibility of fuzzy forms emerging from rich ambient surfaces. Tawny reds, purple grays, and dusty blues glow next to luminous violet, electric turquoise and earthy green fields, with an unknown light source that pushes against the just-visible nub of the canvas. Her brushy, near-monochrome paintings invite situations of undetermined, fluid and unutterable feeling. Despite this seemingly vague and doomed intention, Chae’s canvases are concise, cogent and present a convincing if indescribable visual narrative in color, scale and latent meaning.
 
Fata Morgana is a term used to describe a superior mirage - an unusually persistent mirage that appears on the horizon, and often significantly distorts the objects to which it refers. An optical phenomenon that occurs when rays of light are bent as they pass through layers of air at different temperatures, the mirage often inverts an image that shimmers and moves, hovering above a true image, hence the term ‘superior.’ Fata Morgana  comes from the Italian translation of Morgan Le Fay,  the fairy, shape-shifting half-sister of King Arthur.

It describes very complex superior mirages, where fast-changing mirages appear with alternating stretched and compressed areas, and both erect and inverted forms may be visible on the horizon.
 
You Ni Chae was born in Daegu, South Korea and has both an MFA and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibitions include Guertin’s Graphics, Red Hook, NY; 65Grand Gallery and Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago.