Luminous nocturnal paintings from acclaimed painter Matthew Wong's final exhibition

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."

With the sensibility of a flaneur, Wong's semi-fictional subject matter refers to the sights he witnessed on walks while traveling in Sicily with his mother during the fall of 2018 and winter of 2019. The fully illustrated catalog is introduced with a short story titled 1996-2001, 2020, n.d., by Brad Phillips.