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Refracted figures, oil on canvas 2024
Guizi Gao is a figurative expressionist oil painter whose work investigates the human body as a mutable vessel shaped by social, biological, and psychological forces. Working primarily in large-scale oil painting, she combines Renaissance and Baroque compositional rigor with gestural distortion and tactile, layered surfaces. Influenced by the London School, particularly Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville, Gao treats paint as corporeal matter, building and erasing flesh-like forms. Her signature headless or obscured figures are stripped of fixed identity, transforming from portraiture into archetypal presences with social and emotional resonance.
Gao’s ongoing series Realm of Chaos and its continuation Amazing Grace are informed by Daoist cosmology and her personal experiences of pregnancy, loss, and renewal. The works trace cycles of vital spirit entering the body, awakening, self-tempering, and spiritual ascent. Figures dissolve into organic geometry, translucency, and childlike symbolic forms, exploring womanhood, motherhood, loss, and rebirth, while presenting the body as both intimate and universal.
Gao holds an MFA in Oil Painting from the China Academy of Art and completed graduate study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as certification from the TIAC International Master program with Odd Nerdrum. She has exhibited internationally across the United States, China, France, the U.K., Japan, and Norway, receiving Merit Prizes from the Salmagundi Club International Figurative Art Competition and national awards in China. Beyond her studio practice, she has over fourteen years of teaching experience and has served as a curator and jury member for international art organizations, including Mondial Art Academia France.
My paintings explore the inner thresholds between vulnerability, healing, and transformation through the human body. Working primarily in oil, I create large-scale compositions where fragmented, often headless figures emerge and dissolve echoing both classical sculpture and contemporary psychological states. These bodies are not portraits, but vessels that hold memory, tension, and quiet resilience.
My practice moves between control and release, merging gestural distortion with references to Renaissance and Baroque figuration, as well as the expressive traditions of the London School. Across my ongoing project Amazing Grace, I trace a shift from compression and uncertainty toward softness, renewal, and openness. Forms begin to loosen, becoming more fluid, petal-like, and rhythmic suggesting a body in transition, attuned to both internal sensation and external change.
In my painting becomes a form of care, an act of holding, witnessing, and transformation.
Refracted figures, oil on canvas 2024
Guizi Gao is a figurative expressionist oil painter whose work investigates the human body as a mutable vessel shaped by social, biological, and psychological forces. Working primarily in large-scale oil painting, she combines Renaissance and Baroque compositional rigor with gestural distortion and tactile, layered surfaces. Influenced by the London School, particularly Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville, Gao treats paint as corporeal matter, building and erasing flesh-like forms. Her signature headless or obscured figures are stripped of fixed identity, transforming from portraiture into archetypal presences with social and emotional resonance.
Gao’s ongoing series Realm of Chaos and its continuation Amazing Grace are informed by Daoist cosmology and her personal experiences of pregnancy, loss, and renewal. The works trace cycles of vital spirit entering the body, awakening, self-tempering, and spiritual ascent. Figures dissolve into organic geometry, translucency, and childlike symbolic forms, exploring womanhood, motherhood, loss, and rebirth, while presenting the body as both intimate and universal.
Gao holds an MFA in Oil Painting from the China Academy of Art and completed graduate study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as certification from the TIAC International Master program with Odd Nerdrum. She has exhibited internationally across the United States, China, France, the U.K., Japan, and Norway, receiving Merit Prizes from the Salmagundi Club International Figurative Art Competition and national awards in China. Beyond her studio practice, she has over fourteen years of teaching experience and has served as a curator and jury member for international art organizations, including Mondial Art Academia France.
My paintings explore the inner thresholds between vulnerability, healing, and transformation through the human body. Working primarily in oil, I create large-scale compositions where fragmented, often headless figures emerge and dissolve echoing both classical sculpture and contemporary psychological states. These bodies are not portraits, but vessels that hold memory, tension, and quiet resilience.
My practice moves between control and release, merging gestural distortion with references to Renaissance and Baroque figuration, as well as the expressive traditions of the London School. Across my ongoing project Amazing Grace, I trace a shift from compression and uncertainty toward softness, renewal, and openness. Forms begin to loosen, becoming more fluid, petal-like, and rhythmic suggesting a body in transition, attuned to both internal sensation and external change.
In my painting becomes a form of care, an act of holding, witnessing, and transformation.
