‘Swim Class’ by Yuri Yuan ’21 Added to the Columbus Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection

Swim Class (48" x 60," oil on canvas, 2021), a painting by Visual Arts alumna and Adjunct Assistant Professor Yuri Yuan '21, is featured as part of the Columbus Museum of Art’s PRESENT ’23 exhibition.

The exhibition, which features works from 32 artists, showcases the vitality and stylistic range of contemporary art practice. As noted by the museum, the selected artworks also engage historical forms and narratives as a way of acting upon and being alive to the present moment. 

PRESENT ’23 unveils the second wave of promised gifts that comprise the Columbus Museum of Art’s Scantland Collection, a significant pillar of the museum's permanent collection.

“I am very grateful to be included in the PRESENT ’23 exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art,” Yuan said. “My work in the exhibition, Swim Class (2021), was the first of my works to enter the permanent collection of a museum. This is also the first time my work is showing in a museum. It is definitely a dream come true. One of my life-long goals as an artist is to make works that can be remembered beyond my lifetime. I'm very honored to be in such a prestigious collection at the Columbus Museum of Art. Professionally, it means that my work has been recognized in the context of contemporary art criticism. I hope the work will gain exposure and generate discussions among the diverse audiences in the local community.”

Read more about the exhibition here.

Yuri Yuan (b. 1996, Harbin, China) paints surrealist scenes featuring ambiguous and physically impossible figure-landscape relationships to explore existentialist themes of longing and loss. Through visual symbolism, metaphors, and magical realism, the artist explores the ways in which exterior landscapes become projections of her and her audience’s interior psychological states. Yuan holds a Visual Arts MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Yuan was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship at Columbia University in 2020, and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2019 and 2022. The artist’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen Gallery, New York, NY; Make Room Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK; Rolando Anselmi Gallery, Rome, Italy; Haverkampf Leistenschneider Gallery, Berlin, Germany, among others. Her work is represented in the public collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, and The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA. Yuan lives and works in New York, NY.