Anh Duong (b. 1960, Bordeaux, France) was born and raised in France to a Spanish father and Vietnamese mother. Duong’s mother had, herself, trained as an artist, but gave up painting when her children were born. Duong studied ballet in Paris until age twenty-three, training with the Nora Kiss Academy of Classical Dance and Tessa Beaumont, complementing her ballet studies with an erudition in architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. American architect-turned-photographer David Seidner launched Duong into the fashion world when he executed a set of photographs of Duong in 1985. This prompted Duong’s modeling career, working with Christian Lacroix and Isaac Mizrahi, and a coeval career in Hollywood, where Duong acted as a glamorous gangster’s moll in The Mambo Kings (1992), an immigrant tailoress in Scent of a Woman (1992), and a Louise Brooks character in thirty (1993). By 1988, Duong had left Paris and relocated to New York where she met and moved in with Julian Schnabel, who regularly painted Duong’s slender, Modigliani-like visage and encouraged her painting practice. Three years later, Sperone Westwater Gallery showed Duong’s first painting show in New York; Duong’s inaugural self-portrait, Summer in Montauk (1988), was included in a 1997 show at the PMMK Museum of Modern Art in Ostend, Belgium. Soon, in 1999, the Galerie Jerome de Noirmont in Paris exhibited Duong’s first solo show of self-portraits. Notably, in 2006, she was commissioned by Barry Diller to execute a nine-foot stainless steel sculpture of Diane von Fürstenberg. Since then, Duong has had numerous one-woman shows of her work at venerable institutions, including Sonnabend Gallery (New York, 2011), Robilant + Voena (London, 2014), and Galerie Gmurzynska, where she has been regularly exhibiting since 2021.
Duong’s work belongs to public collections including the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.) and the Statue of Liberty Museum, New York, which commissioned Duong’s 50 sculpted stars for the new museum entrance in 2019. Duong’s work also belongs to illustrious private collections, including filmmakers, artists, architects and designers ranging from Dennis Hopper to Bruno Bischofberger, Spyros Niarchos, Simon de Pury, Patrick Painter, and Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. Duong has gained widespread acclaim for her singular portraits, painting the likeness of Vincent Gallo, Susan Sarandon, Anjelica Huston, Karen Elson, Christian Louboutin. A number of these portraits are on display in Galerie Gmurzynska’s new show, which spans the breadth of Duong’s portraiture.
There is a characteristic fleshiness to Duong's portraits—a crisp fleshiness, distinct from the Neo-Expressionist thickets of Jenny Saville’s brushwork and the flat roseate nudes of Maureen Dougherty’s sprightly fêtes galantes. Duong’s paintings are executed in veristic style and uncompromisingly theatrical in substance; they are tethered to an elliptical world striped with narratives that we only catch glimpses at. There is a cinematic quality to Duong’s use of light and her composition, her splinter-scenes rife with narratives attested to by her titles (e.g., Apres la Dispute (After the fight), 2006; The Gentlewoman or the Aggravation of our Incoherences, 2022; Between Epicureanism and Stoicism, 2022). More often than not, Duong’s subjects are women. Though they might flaunt the vaudeville garb of an 18th century empresses donned in russet-curled wigs and half-sheeted in knight’s armor, as in The Impossible Gender Frontiers (2022), Duong’s women are palpably real and contemporary. They are real in their playful attire, dressing for themselves alone, and they are real in how lamplight or the sun’s rays bounce between the furrows of their skin, revealing pocks and ridges. Duong’s likeness is thoroughgoing, the artist’s most consistent motif amidst changes in proportion, setting, and age. Such is the confessional nature of Duong’s oeuvre, which oscillates between portraiture, self-portraiture, and still lifes of resplendent plants, bejeweled pumps, and shriveled paint tubes, their contents exhausted.