The National Gallery of Canada recently acquired five sculptures by Associate Professor An Te Liu for inclusion in their Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art. The works were initially created for Liu's solo exhibition, Mono No Ma, at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto last fall.

“With this series, An Te Liu breathes new life into formalism,” writes Marc Mayer, Director of the National Gallery. ”By alchemically transforming the strictly utilitarian into contemplative objects of desire, he reopens the abandoned formalist mine and extracts an ore rich in beauty, intelligence, humour, history, economics, and identity.”

The works will be featured in the National Gallery's upcoming Canadian Biennial 2014: Shine a Light, curated by Josée Drouin-Brisebois and Jonathan Shaughnessy. Recent editions of the works were exhibited by Brussels-based Galerie Catherine Bastide at the Cologne Art Fair this spring, and are currently on exhibit at the Kunsthalle Vienna in the exhibition Das Brancusi-Effekt, curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen and Vanessa Joan Müller.

For more on An Te Liu and his work, visit his website anteliu.com.