Gala artwork 2018: ken lum

The Crusader

2017 | Letter Press print | 38” x 60” | courtesy of the Artist and Royale Projects, Los Angeles

Reserve: $6500  

The Crusader by Ken Lum is from Necrology, 2017, a print series originally exhibited at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco. The series consists of large-scale prints with appropriated lines from obituaries and biographies that create fictional characters, such as keypunch operator Charlotte Wilson Turner, or more general archetypes like The Crusader. Lum unfolds a cast of characters using a discordant design that profusely separates sentences and descriptors into opulent and varied letterpress fonts printed at a body-sized scale.

The extensive career of Vancouver-born artist, educator and writer, Ken Lum, consists of painting, sculpture, performance and photography. Lum is known for his conceptual and representational art, which often explore constructions of identity, globalization, consumerist culture and language. He has worked on several permanent public art projects in the cities of Vienna, Rotterdam, Leiden, Toronto and Vancouver, and is a co-founder and editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Lum has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, NY; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Montreal; Vancouver Art Gallery; the Venice Biennale; and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His work is currently on exhibition at Plug In and at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He is currently the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia, and has previously taught at the University of British Columbia, Bard College, and l’Ecole des Beaux Arts.

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