Artwork Description
Hung Liu – By the Horns
Dimensions: 60 x 60″ unframed
Year: 2020
Medium: oil on canvas
Hung Liu’s By the Horns is inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl Era FSA photography. Here, Liu renders children who don’t have the toys or even shoes one would expect American children to have. Yet, they look happy and content, playing with a farmyard goat, rather than the typical family dog or cat pet. Liu herself was a migrant like these children, and she left her hometown like they did, in search of a better life in a new place. Liu knows what it is like to lose the carefree nature of childhood, and in this painting, she gives this sense of carefree happiness back to these children.
Hung Liu’s paintings are found in more than 50 museums throughout the world, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. With two career retrospectives at both the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and The Oakland Museum of California, Hung Liu is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of our century. She serves as a humanitarian and feminist role model for artists throughout the world, and her works are among the most collectible of all contemporary artists.