Anh Duong

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Art career

Although Duong has always drawn and painted, it was after spending a summer painting at the Warhol Estate in Montauk in 1989 that she decided to focus on art. Soon after in 1991, she had her first solo exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery of 12 large portraits measuring 8 × 6 feet each.

In 1997, she had her first museum exhibition at P.M.M.K. – Provincial Museum of Modern Art, Ostende, Belgium which led to an exhibition at Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris in 1999 with more than 65 Self-portraits on display followed by a show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York in 2000.

A book about her work, Anh Duong (Self) Portraits, was published in 2001.

Duong has since become a recognized painter in New York City. Forgetting the subject to focus on the technical painting itself, she focuses on the portrait, and mostly the self-portrait she has painted on a daily basis as a diary. "(...) her paintings expose an unexpected, unglamorous, intimate relationship with her body (...) Duong's paintings should be viewed as contributions to a different genre – they belong alongside the work of women such as Dora Maar, Anaïs Nin, and Frida Kahlo, artists who compellingly exposed interior worlds whose beauty, intelligence, and character inspired creativity, both in themselves and in others."

Today, she is represented by Galerie Gmurzynska. For her exhibition at Robilant + Voena in 2014 a catalogue was published with an essay called True Selfie by Phoebe Hoban in which she writes: "Painter Anh Duong has created her own personal genre: call it the 'True Selfie.' Long before digital self-images—or 'selfies'—became virtually ubiquitous, Duong, like many figurative painters, decided to make herself the subject of an ongoing series of self-portraits. But unlike other painters, who rely on their own reflection in a mirror as a reference, Duong has exclusively focused on portraying what she calls her 'true' self."

Duong's latest series of paintings, done over the past two years, shows the artist in a variety of poses, from provocatively trapped in the kitchen in couture underwear, to nakedly framed in a bathtub. But they all share the same arresting sense of the artist seeing herself for the first time, thus catching herself in a moment of profound psychological vulnerability. Stripped of her familiar, everyday persona, the paintings powerfully project dormant layers of Duong's inner self. "I feel like painting is a place where I can both hide, and I can show the most."

The National Portrait Gallery (United States) acquired an 8 x 6-foot portrait Duong painted of Diane von Furstenberg, which was part of the touring exhibition Journey of a Dress.

Anh Duong

Anh Duong

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