Showcasing artworks by painter Nguyen Thanh Binh

In this April, Craig Thomas Gallery takes its space to present new artworks by Saigon-based artist Nguyen Thanh Binh. Over a career that now spans nearly a half a century, Binh has brought joy and pleasure to multitudes of collectors with his iconic paintings.

Once an American art critic said that Nguyen Thanh Binh was likely the best “pure drawer” of any painter in Vietnam. This is reflected through his lines which have an elegance and form that are unique to him.

While it would be deductive to attribute his great success to the application of a natural talent, Binh pushes back on this. He confirms that he continues to work on the perfection and advancement of his painting every day. He goes to bed at an early hour and rises in the wee hours of the morning to do his work with an almost monastic devotion.

One looks at the poses of his ballerinas or at the flowing ao dai of two young girls and can clearly imagine the sketch from which they might have emerged. Starting from a place of such purity and elegance, Binh then adds color and form resulting in a painting of intensely simple beauty.

Over his long and heralded career, Binh has produced an astonishing corpus of work that has in a way become synonymous in many people’s minds of Vietnamese painting writ large.

Binh has a number of classic themes – his ballerinas, the ao dai, the mother and daughter – but he has a whole separate branch of landscape paintings as well as many other still life themes.