“I wanted to make painted sculpture, because there have not been modern examples of it that really deal with the issues of both painting and sculpture. My interest is in the fusion of painting and sculpture so that the painting in the sculpture is intrinsic to the form making, not decorating it. This is a tradition that has been seen in many ancient cultures, but has not been thoroughly explored in our era.”
Anne Chu (1959 - 2016) graduated from Philadelphia College of Art in 1982 and received her MFA from Columbia University in 1985. Chu created watercolor paintings, and sculptures made from a variety of materials, most notably: chainsaw-carved wood, embroidered textiles, and large ceramics. She was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Penny McCall Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and winner of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Competition.
The New York–based artist, whose otherworldly sculptures and installations—classical figures merged with sundry modernist forms, gently pulverized, then charged with a spectral, deadpan humor—died July 25, 2016.
Chu received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1982 and earned her MFA from Columbia University only three years later. Since 1991, she has had more than thirty solo exhibitions at a number of institutions and galleries throughout the United States and abroad, including Victoria Miro, London; Monica De Cardenas, Milan and Zuoz; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Karlheinz Meyer, Karlsruhe; 303 Gallery, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Chu has also been the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards. Among them are a John and Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 1999, and the Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize in 2009.
In regard to Chu’s exhibition at the Kunstmuseen Krefeld/Museum Haus Lange, critic Hans Rudolf Reust said in the March 2013 issue of Artforum, “Chu’s installation surprises with an array of cultural fragments whose amalgamation seems at once unconventional and natural. The return of ornamentality, a lascivious luxury in spatial geometry, is here more than the return of what modernism repressed. She creates a bucolic and hybrid world that will certainly leave its mark on our memories of the rooms of the Haus Lange, already shaped by so many important exhibitions.”