Matthew WongBlue

This volume compiles oil and gouaches by the self-taught Canadian painter Matthew Wong (1984–2019) developed for his 2019 solo exhibition Matthew Wong: Blue at Karma Gallery in New York. The dusky and nocturnal scenes were intended as the coda to a previous series of day-lit oil and gouache paintings. All share a watery treatment, awash in blue and its proximal colors. For this body of work, completed over the past year of his life, Wong concerned himself with the “blueness of blue”: its fluidity, its affect, and its uncanny ability to “activate nostalgia, both personal and collective.”