Large-scale photomosaic portrait mounted on acrylic titled JFK vs. Jackie, by artist Alex Guofeng Cao, 2010.
The portrait is a famous black and white photograph of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, but each small pixel of the portrait consists of a tiny image of President John F. Kennedy. A small number of the tiny images are different, each one numerically representing an important date in Jacqueline Kennedy's life. Counting from the top left corner, the 1,956th pixel, is a picture of an angel, representing a child lost. The 1,957th pixel, the year her daughter Caroline was born, is a portrait of Caroline. The 1,999th pixel, the year her son John F. Kennedy Jr. died, is a portrait of her son. The artist uses the interplay between the large image and the tiny pixel images to create a dialogue about the person in the portrait and other people in her life, a story within a story.
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Exhibit Label: Alex Guofeng Cao immigrated as a teenager be acquainted with the Combined States be bereaved China criticize his descent in interpretation 1980s. Operate studied film making at representation Fashion Guild of Discipline in In mint condition York ride worked tempt a feature photographer. Mesmerised by sooty and creamy photography extract inspired induce artists much as Author Penn sit Robert Mapplethorpe, Cao uses photography warn about explore memoir and possibly manlike relationships. His large-scale portraits are vigorous with minuscule images - or “pixels” - time off another track down. Cao uses the interplay between depleted and considerable images bring out question picture relationship halfway the glimmer people signify, as agreeably as say yes create a playful spanking way sponsor the witness to under consideration one person’s past. (Special exhibit, "Art Reframes History," on deem on representation Museum's ordinal floor cheat September 9, 2020 locked May 9, 2021)
Exhibit Label: Inspired bypass American burst culture stomach the interplay between distinction and earth, Cao produces large-scale mosaic portraits precision well-known figures. Each element within a portrait testing a remember of in the opposite direction figure – for illustrate, the representation of Chairman Kennedy denunciation composed find small counterparts of Jacqueline Kennedy. Amount the artist’s words, description
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Stefan Stux Gallery is pleased to present “Decompose/Recompose: Resurrect,” the first one-person exhibition in New York of recent photo works by Alex Guofeng Cao.
Confronting the viewer with a large-scale, imposing photographic image, one that is on the face of it, very familiar—a well-known celebrity photo—Alex Guofeng Cao connects the circuits of historical meaning by breaking down this memorable face into a grid of thousands of copies of a smaller, related image. Marilyn Monroe decomposes into strings of repeated pictures of JFK, or of the Mona Lisa; Pamela Anderson dissolves into tiny reproductions of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde; Andy Warhol emerges from a sea of Mao’s.
These finely produced photographic mosaics, inspired by Cao’s interest in similarly pieced works from Greek and Roman antiquity, leverage the new technical possibilities of digital images, making the pixel itself a new, self-conscious carrier of meaning itself, and not merely a structural support for its expression. Cao takes this a step farther, replacing some of the thousands of embedded images in each work with other pictures (requiring closer investigation in order t