The Fire Is Burning in my Heart

GR Gallery is pleased to announce “Vitamins 4 your Soul” and “The Fire Is Burning in my Heart”, two concurrent solo exhibitions featuring artists David Von Barr and Weiyang Gao. The shows will reveal, for the first time in a public exhibition, the latest series of artworks that the artists have been working on for the past months. These two separate new bodies of work will independently invade the gallery space, contrasting and counterbalancing each other in an ideal conversation that will blur the boundaries of abstraction and figuration.  The shows will put together a total of sixteen paintings on canvas in various sizes.

Opening reception: Friday April 05, 6:00pm - 8:00pm (Exhibition Dates: April 06 – April 27, 2024). Members of the press can contact GR gallery in advance to schedule a private viewing and an interview with the artists. 

GR Gallery, 255 Bowery (between Houston & Stanton) New York, NY 10002 |

 info@gr-gallery.com | tel: +1 212 273 2900

Weiyang Gao’s new series embodies a journey through space-time, where ethereality meets order, expressing our desire for liberty within imposed frameworks. Each piece is an adventure, capturing universal rhythms and human emotions. The deliberate placement of hand-painted patterns against cosmic flows illustrates his search for balance between freedom and societal constraints. Color is his medium for conveying the universe's vibrancy, quantum field's possibilities, and the depths of his feelings. In ‘The Fire Is Burning in my Heart’ every canvas invites viewers to contemplate their role in the grand expanse of the cosmos, simultaneously significant and minute. His aim is to inspire awe and introspection, connecting the mystical with the everyday, and the fleeting with the everlasting. Wei’s paintings blur the categories of figuration and abstraction. During his creating process, he reduces the human figure into its most basic forms, then repeats the figure over and over again until the individual is lost in a collective pattern. He uses this visual language to bring his insight into the many ways people have used and abused culture and history to create barriers and divisions within the broader spectrum of humanity. Within his paintings, executed with a mix of inks, acrylic and oil, he addresses the feelings of being oppressed by those barriers and aims to find a place that transcends culture and history; he builds imagery of sacred spaces, devoid of specific religious or spiritual demarcations, in order to allow all audiences a place for spiritual and meditative contemplation. He is creating a new system of symbolism within his works in effort to reconnect his audience with the ineffable source of all spirituality, outside of specific cultural or temporal paradigms. Weiyang Gao (b.1993) is a Chinese artist based in New York City. Wei received his BFA in 2018 from Boston University and his MFA in painting and drawing in 2021 from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has shown at Visionary Project in New York, Mu Gallery, Research House of Asian Art, and FLXST, among others.