The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Winter Visual Grant to Catalina Ouyang for her upcoming solo exhibition “Trick”

Catalina Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects. Their practice embraces an array of materials including hand-carved wood and stone, appropriated literature and film, family secrets, animal parts, antiques, a half-scale plywood replica of a historic building entrance, and a full-scale replica of a trench toilet, all presented with varying degrees of legibility. Against affirmational conventions of representation and repair, the works instigate relation through violation.

Ouyang has held solo exhibitions at: Night Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022; No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH, 2022; Lyles & King, New York, 2021 and 2020; the Knockdown Center, Queens, 2020; and Make Room, Los Angeles, 2019. Their work has been included in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, Portland, Maine; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; EFA Project Space, New York; James Fuentes Gallery, New York; Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles; Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria; and BRIC, Brooklyn, among others. Ouyang’s work has been reviewed and featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, Flash Art, Momus, and Frieze. Their work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen; and Pond Society, Shanghai. Ouyang received an MFA from Yale University and is based in New York. They are represented by Lyles & King in New York and Night Gallery in Los Angeles.

"Trick" is a solo exhibition of new sculpture, painting, and installation spanning the main gallery and outdoor courtyard of Lyles and King. “Trick” references both an act of deception and the act of selling sex, an ages-old yet maligned method of financing art-making and other acts of living. In the outdoor courtyard stands a 15-foot tall replica of a scold’s bridle, an instrument of punishment and public humiliation resembling a cage on a victim’s head. The contraption, dating from the 1500s, was used primarily on women considered to be “rude,” in order to prevent the wearer from speaking. A spiked bridle bit was inserted into the mouth and painfully compressed the tongue. Ouyang's sculpture magnifies this device to an architectural scale, casting the empty interior—what would otherwise be occupied by a victim’s silenced head—as a monument to transgression. Constructed out of raw steel, the piece continues Ouyang's work on speech and silencing.

The rest of the exhibition, installed in the indoor gallery space, consists of multi-media sculptures, oil paintings, and installation works, citing a range of images including the famed courtesan Sarah Bernhardt, Catherine Breillat's notorious film Anatomy of Hell, and Christ Himself.

”Trick” will be presented at Lyles & King Gallery on May 10, 2024.

Please visit Catalina’s Instagram and website for more information.