Tony Huynh American, b. 1986

Tony Huynh’s paintings are composed of intimate and fragmented stories, steeped in poetic surrealism. His process is one of discovery, where grounded experiences transform into imaginary imagery through layered mark-making, experimenting with texture, and constant revising. Huynh’s compositions emerge through the materiality of paint—scraping, layering, and reworking; the result is something both familiar and otherworldly. 

His subject matter—ingenuous depictions of landscapes and animals—hovers between rough and raw while simultaneously feeling refined. Chickens tussle over a wishbone in a verdant field, a horse grazes amid pink, pompous trees, or a serene seascape shimmers through a window-like frame; evocative of storybook worlds where sand meets sea in tranquil reverie. These scenes draw from the romantic restraint of American landscapes and unadorned forms, and the atmosphere of printmaking, where light presents nature with an emotional resonance. Yet, tiny, intentional details—raindrops scraped into the canvas, bashful expressions carved into animal forms, or star-strewn skies—reveal carefully woven narratives. These tales, Huynh notes, arise from the resonances of everyday interactions, memories, and conversations, transforming the ordinary into the mythic.

Huynh’s compression of multiple, interrelated methods of painting drawn from the last century of art history captures how the artist might make a small painting feel really big, or how to compress a vast subject into only the most essential elements. 

Born in San Francisco in 1986, Tony Huynh graduated from the California College of the Arts and now works from his studio in Sacramento, CA. His paintings are part of international collections and have been included in solo and group exhibitions, including at the San Diego Museum of Art, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY; Scroll NYC, NY; and Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne, Germany.