New York, NY- Space 776 is pleased to present "Home," a solo exhibition by a New York City-based artist Francine Hsu Davis. The exhibition presents Davis’s work from 2017 to the present.

 

Francine Hsu Davis’s work is related to spaces and memories that are close to home for her. Davis spent a few formative years between 2014 and 2016 as a visual artist in Taipei where her family is originally from. During this time, she created what she calls “microscopic topography”; small sketches of the urban landscape of Taipei that capture a very small part of the city. To Davis, rusted metal doors, fading paint on walls, and scraped-off building exteriors seem to tell the unwritten history of Taipei. By drawing these, she documents a moment in time and celebrates the unsung stories of the city. Davis’s paintings created between 2017 and 2020 in San Francisco and New York are heavily based on these drawings made during her stay in Taipei. Although her works from this period are mostly representational, a few pieces like On the Way to Camp (2020) foreshadows the artist’s transition to large-scale abstract paintings.

 

In 2020 when the pandemic hit the U.S., Davis’s depiction of home shifted to a more personal level. Being in quarantine with her two daughters and husband, Davis started creating large abstract paintings motivated by an urge to dissolve her emotions and pressures from the enhanced familial responsibilities. Repetitive vertical brush strokes dominantly used in her paintings from this period represent the overwhelming grooming demands and the cleaning needs of the apartment. The influence of the ink painting and calligraphy techniques she learned in Taipei are also visible in her works from this time.

 

Presenting Francine Hsu Davis’s extensive body of work from 2017 to the present, "Home" invites the audiences to explore the artist’s diverse experiences of home and to understand how her paintings have changed over time to tell the stories of different cities and cultures entangled with her personal memories. 

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