From June 5th to August 24th, 2025.
Curators: ART/AROUND in collaboration with Georgiana Uhlyarik
Co-existing in multiple states at the same time, the quantum physics concept of superposition is part of Jinny Yu’s latest exploration into painting, abstraction and identity politics. Yu moved to Montreal from Seoul in 1988 andstudied with some of the most reputable artists teaching at Concordia University, including Guido Molinari, who had a profound impact on her sensibilities, formal explorations, and modes of production.
Now an internationally renowned artist, Yu has come full circle; the exhibition at FGM will feature seminal works from the last ten years of her practice, including her latest series, Inextricably Ours (2021-ongoing), recently presented in her solo show At Once, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Staring at her multi-stable images, we flip our gaze back and forth between receding-and- protruding forms, in a cerebral challenge of perceptual reversal. Coalescing as one and many at the same time, they become effective visual metaphors for her probing into universal questions about existence and alternative ways of perceiving it. They are a visible symbol of her career-long quest on what it means to belong and/or un-belong.
The works selected will be a manifest to Yu’s progressive thinking, formal fluidity and existential questions of representation and reflection, thus opening portals through which we can stare at uncertainty and at a potential gestalt.
Born in Seoul in 1976, Jinny Yu moved to Montreal in 1988. Yu received her BFA in painting and drawing from Concordia University (1998) and her MFA and MBA from York University in Toronto (2002). Currently based in Ottawa and Berlin, she divides her time as a professional artist and as a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.
Yu’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group shows in Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2024), the Contemporary Art Institute, Daegu, South Korea (2018) and the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015). She has received multiple awards and grants, and has been an artist in residence in important institutions around the world. Her works are featured in prestigious public collections, such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Ottawa Art Gallery, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Canada Council Art Bank, and Global Affairs Canada, among others.
For the past twenty-five years, Yu has been prodding the complexities of pictorial spatiality, abstraction and political identities through her painting practice. Formally and conceptually, she challenges painterly and material conventions while hypothesizing new ways of seeing, perceiving and understanding the world around us.
ART/AROUND
A CURATORIAL VISION
Behind the Superposition exhibition are two bold female curators with a long-standing passion for the arts, as well as for artists and their social engagement. Concerned with global issues and social justice, this dynamic duo is committed to highlighting emerging talent from around the world, guided by a strong ethical component; they are visionaries who aspire to make a positive change in society. Complementing one another in terms of interests and expertise, the curators have combined their energies and opted for anonymity, allowing the artists to reclaim agency and self-representation as creators.
Georgiana Uhlyarik is Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, and co-lead of the Indigenous + Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Prior to joining the AGO, Uhlyarik held roles at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, The Power Plant, Mercer Union and the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. An award-winning curator and author, Uhlyarik works collaboratively with artists, scholars and curators from across the Americas and Europe with a focus on women artists. Projects include: Jinny Yu: at once; Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody (The Broad, Los Angeles); Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO; Magnetic North: Imagining Canada in Painting 1910-1940 (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt); Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak; Rita Letendre: Fire & Light; Georgia O’Keeffe (Tate Modern), Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry (Jewish Museum, NY); Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic (Terra Foundation for American Art and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo); and Introducing Suzy Lake. Uhlyarik is adjunct faculty in Art, York University and University of Toronto. Originally from Romania, she lives in Toronto with her twin sons.
