Cyan Dee, who has been exhibiting under the name Machiko Edmondson, is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at the University of Brighton after earning her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 1995. She has shown her work internationally at various galleries, museums, and art fairs, including Victoria Miro Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery in London, Centro Brasileiro Britânico in São Paulo, Stills in Edinburgh, Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands, and Harris Museum in Preston. Her work has also been featured at prestigious events such as Frieze and The Armory Show. Most recently, she participated in the group exhibition 'HEADS ROLL' at Graves Gallery/Museums Sheffield, curated by Paul Morrison in 2018.

Her paintings have been included in numerous curated shows, alongside the works of

Alex Katz, Glenn Brown, Peter Doig, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Yinka Shonibare, Jeff Koons, Tony Oursler, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Cindy Sherman, Mariko Mori, Marlene Dumas, Michael Craig-Martin, Paul Morrison, Mark Wallinger, Andy Warhol, and many more.

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Having been featured regularly at auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, a couple of her paintings have achieved more than six figures (USD) in the past.

 

She is a British artist.

After a four-year stint in New York, she now lives and works in London, where she has been since the early 1980s.

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M. Edmondson refers to her practice as 'representation of painting’ rather than being representational.
Despite the overt use of faces as her image source, she regards her work as neither figurative paintings nor portraits. Employing the momentary seduction of fashion photography to lure the viewers into the world of idealised beauty and yearning, her paintings mimic the styles and codes of the desire industry to question the value and obsessions of aspirational perfection.
Just as in fashion photography, where the model is a support for the product and contextualises it, such images also support and contextualise Edmondson’s paintings. Although seductive, the ideal they present becomes hyper-real: the image is devoid of identity and a paradoxically empty facade, which is quickly consumed, giving way to the anxiety and obsession that assert these paintings as paintings. Beyond the image that gives them their presence, what is being portrayed here is the question of the aspirational perfection of painting itself. As the viewer engages with these works and scans the surface, shifting their reading between fantasy and the tropes of modernist abstract painting, the skin of the image and the skin of the painted surface, these works become paintings of unattainable desire and material tokens of mediated desire.

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