In "Starry Night," Matthew Wong pays a clear homage to Vincent Van Gogh's iconic artwork. Nature once more takes center stage, surpassing human presence. Wong employs a mark-making technique reminiscent not only of Van Gogh but also of Yayoi Kusama, using a network of small dots and short strokes of color to create the fields and sky. Amidst this vibrant display, a town emerges, brushed in blocks of cooler blues, curving between the fields and reaching toward a series of imposing hills in the distance.

Published by the Art Gallery of Ontario in association with the Matthew Wong Foundation. Blue View was Wong’s first museum exhibition, and these prints were authorised by the Matthew Wong Foundation.

Produced in connection with the landmark 2021 exhibition, this is an authorised Matthew Wong publication with direct provenance to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

There is something particularly appropriate about the way these prints came into the world.

Matthew Wong was a largely self taught artist whose career developed outside many of the traditional routes into the art world. He shared his work online, formed relationships with other artists through social media and developed his practice through looking, learning and an intuitive process of discovery.

The prints published in association with Blue View were not presented as conventional numbered fine art editions. No edition number was printed on the works and no total production quantity was published.

We cannot know whether Wong himself would have chosen to produce them in this way. Yet there is an interesting continuity between an artist whose work first travelled so freely through images and conversations, and these authorised museum publications, which allowed his extraordinary images to travel beyond the walls of his first museum exhibition.

Today that accessibility has acquired an unexpected consequence. The prints are no longer readily available from their original institutional source and examples appear very infrequently on the secondary market. What began as an accessible way of encountering Wong’s work has itself become scarce.

Provenance:

Art Gallery of Ontario

MODO, Cambridge