ArtScene Continuing & Recommended Exhibition

ArtScene is a press that promotes up-and-coming artists. Writers often attend the exhibition themselves before writing about their favorite piece in the exhibition. ArtScene raves about Yi-li Ward's investigation of the psychic of humanity through the anatomy of shapes, gestures, and color. The female body is no longer just sensual, but the pose and the way the figure angles her body also sets the scene for story that needs to be told. Pieces like Conversation and Celedon Lady are prime examples of the mastery of these elements combined. ArtScene took the liberty to promote Yi-li's works in her solo exhibition, "Go Figure."

If you can visualize a cross between Matisse's freedom of color, Cezanne's hints of structure, and Alice Neel's brutal honesty about the body, you have a feel for the works of Yi-li Chin Ward.

Yi-li investigates one theme--the nude--as pure color, a fast-moving gesture, and a complex symbol of beauty and arousal. These women's breasts are built of ellipses, like the exercises in art school life drawing; they are treated to emphasize that the body is just a shape. But once that comes across, you realize that the artist charges and alters these images also to cue us that the female body is so much more than geometry. Yi-li Chin Ward, "Fourteen," acrylic and charcoal, 40 x 30".

She fuses the long classical tradition of the nude and the expressionistic movements of Modernism by giving her bright unclad forms little details like glasses or the hint of the jagged roundness that comes with age. You will enjoy this show if you like figurative art and want to see an intuitive colorist. It is called "Go Figure" (57 Underground, Pomona).