MAI TA | BLUE GIRL
Presse Release
Pablo's Birthday is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of the Vietnamese artist Mai Ta at the gallery and in the United States. The exhibition showcases recent work created by the artist during 2021 and features, for the first time, the artist's timid new incursion into paintings.
Mai Ta's work has always been autobiographical. Everything that she puts down on paper is a reflection of her own life. A personal altar of her experiences. Her paintings became her solace when she can't put feelings into words. Along with that is the element of change. Transformations follow her closely in her life, so naturally, they make their presence known in her works as well.
There's something powerful about emotional vulnerability that she cannot recreate in her daily life. Only in art, only through colors and her own symbolisms, only through those means can her emotions come fully into the light. Like everyone, she holds secrets. Secret feelings, secret words. They all have a sacred place in her heart and become the ultimate inspiration for Ta whenever she creates.
So when you are viewing "Blue Girl", allow yourself to get lost in your own world of symbolism. Your own secret feelings, your own hidden world. There is nothing to be understood from Mai Ta's work aside from your own experiences since she believes that we all have our own hidden "Blue Girl". Everything that we see in art is merely a reflection of our own emotional world and our own reality.
Mai Ta (b.1997. Saigon, Vietnam) works and lives in Saigon. Ta graduated from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, NY, in 2019 with a Bachelors in Fine Art and Illustration. The artist's work has been featured in Elephant Magazine, Colossal Magazine, Booooooom Magazine, Heritage In-flight Magazine, The Lab-Saigon, and the Nashville Review. Mai Ta has been a part of national and international exhibitions such as London's Burning, Ramp Gallery, London (2021), memoirs, Pablo's Birthday, New York (2020), Somebody, Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco (2020), the Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, Brooklyn (2019), among others. Ta was recently awarded the 2020 Nancy Lee Rhodes Roberts Scholarship Award by the Society of Illustrators in New York, NY.