David Zwirner is pleased to present Lìxià, a bilingual online-only presentation in Chinese and English highlighting major works by nineteen gallery artists. The title refers to the beginning of summer on the traditional East Asian calendars, a date which coincides with the reopening of the doors of our Hong Kong gallery.
Welcome back.
“This picture is undoubtedly one of my favorites. It flowed straight out of the brush. The painting reveals, against the backdrop of an evening city, a sequence of brightly lit stalls, with sellers standing in front of each looking for customers. Perhaps, subconsciously, Far Eastern memories slipped into the scenery; at least the rows and rows of small shopping stalls at night remind me of my experiences in Hong Kong.”
—Neo Rauch
“Each [Homage work] has its own inner light, scale and spatial rhythm; together they attest to the instability of color and perception.”
“The perception of color is deceiving. We may perceive two different colors to look alike, or two equal colors to look different. This game of colors—the change of identity—is the object of my study.”
—Josef Albers
“There’s undeniably something raw and rugged about [his paintings], in the way Ancart uses oil sticks to fill every inch of canvas with densely worked color....They seem sophisticated, knowing....They invoke the history of the medium, particularly those high-modernist concerns regarding flatness, surface and abstraction.”
—ArtReview
“Pumpkins have been a great comfort to me since my childhood; they speak to me of the joy of living. They are humble and amusing at the same time, and I have and always will celebrate them in my art.”
—Yayoi Kusama
While pumpkin shapes have appeared in Yayoi Kusama’s work since her early art studies in Japan in the 1950s, this organic form gained a central importance in her oeuvre from the late 1980s onward. The present work is part of a series of pumpkin sculptures made in bronze, the first time the artist has worked with the material on this scale.
“Morandi’s stagings of his repertory company of nondescript bottles, vases, pitchers, and whatnot are definitive twentieth-century art works. They breathe intimacy with the past—Piero della Francesca, Chardin—and address a future that still glimmers, just out of reach. They remain unbeatably radical meditations on what can and can’t happen when three dimensions are transposed into two.”
“Nature, however you look at it, is always unadorned, fresh, and beautiful. I wonder if my paintings could capture the beauty of nature. No, it would be impossible. Even so, I want to make paintings that, like nature, one never tires of looking at.”
—Yun Hyong-keun
“Somewhere between geometry and gesture, the ‘Umber Blue’ series are remarkable for their brevity and solemn beauty. The paintings recall both traditional Chinese ink painting and Modernist abstraction. Whilst never abandoning haptic pleasures, the images produced also seduce the eye.”
Mamma Andersson
瑪瑪·安德森
“Myriad fragmentary narratives pervade Andersson’s work, which integrates various dichotomies—past and present, outdoors and indoors, roughness and delicacy—to spellbinding effect. Residue, traces, and shadows; quiet dramas intriguingly suggested but never fully revealed.”
—Artforum
“Everything boils down to a memory, the perception of a memory, and how to displace a memory.”
—Mamma Andersson
“Davis accomplished one of the most moving, effective fusions of paint handling, narrative and symbolism in recent American art. Ostensibly traditional but actually unbelievably subtle and rich, the paintings make everything count, from the gestures and expressions of their subjects to tiny touches of color. Davis’s goal was to show African-Americans in ‘normal scenarios.’ He did this, and more, creating images that speak to the human condition.”
“I feel there is immense freedom in painting to create your own universe—if you don’t let ‘Art History’ or pretense get in the way.”
—Noah Davis
“I told the truth the best I was able. I think that the best art is the art that makes the truest statement of when it was existing, both aesthetic, and political, and everything.”
—Alice Neel
Suzan Frecon
蘇珊·弗雷孔
“In her painting, Frecon engages with color and texture, the intersection of vision and the material world, particularly as it is manifested in oil paint. It is a finely attuned openness to the world that we encounter in Frecon’s work, a sense of color unlike anyone else’s. Can we let go of words and just look? Can we live in silence long enough to begin seeing what is in front of our eyes?”
“I don’t paint paintings of something. The painting is the explanation….I try to get beyond that, to a higher plane of abstraction where the painting is its own strength.”
—Suzan Frecon
“[Josh Smith] is a passionate cynic, an artist who degrades and celebrates his medium through the relentless yet fervent repetition of a selected motif....This automatism opens the door to incessant variations in brushwork, background and, above all, color—as well as our consideration of [the] same.”
“I make a piece of art just to prove that I exist in my own way. And I can’t make something nice. I have to make something that makes me uncomfortable.”
—Josh Smith
Oscar Murillo
奧斯卡·穆里略
“[I’m] thinking about mark-making and crystalizing mark-making in relation to my energy…to my own anxiety as an individual. And how I can tweak that, calibrate it, and make sure that how I make paintings is not simply an exercise but how does it enter into a dialogue with a canon, a Western canon of making painting.”
—Oscar Murillo
“...[Murilllo’s] vibrant, clever paintings spoke of cultural dislocation, using a bold range of techniques—montage, wordplay, abstract expressionism.”
Barbara Kruger
芭芭拉·克魯格
“I am interested in working with pictures and words, because I think they have the power to tell us who we are and who we aren’t, who we can be and who we can never be.”
—Barbara Kruger
All proceeds from the sale of Barbara Kruger's Untitled (It's New, It's You), 2014, will be donated by the artist to The Kitchen, a multidisciplinary space in New York City, as part of the nonprofit organization’s 50th Anniversary Benefit. Presented in cooperation with Sprüth Magers.
“The archetypal Borremans painting is a seductive enigma, a bouillabaisse of specificity, obscurity, anxiety, humor and great technique.”
Courtesy the artist, TANK Shanghai, and WIELS.
“My work always tends to capture an intensity; it has a quiet and meditative quality. I feel the roots of such traits are embedded in aspects of many Asian cultures.”
—Michaël Borremans
Lucas Arruda
盧卡斯·阿魯達
“The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural—it’s simply that viewers automatically register my format as a landscape, although none of the images can be traced to a geographic location. It's the idea of landscape as a structure, rather than a real place.”
—Lucas Arruda
“Working along the border between abstraction and representation…, [Arruda] is, it seems, genuinely compelled by the idea of capturing lived experience in paint. Part of that is being metaphorically on the outer fringe of civilization and peering into the unknown and perhaps unknowable cosmos. It is the thrill of the sublime.”
“Most often, the objects chosen for Genzken’s assemblages are themselves reproductions of meaningful elements in the world….Sometimes slightly embellished by Genzken, with a swath of paint or a strip of fabric, these elements still retain their connection to their real-world identities and, most importantly, their real-world meanings, both literal and symbolic.”
—Laura Hoptman, Isa Genzken, MoMA exhibition catalogue
“Luc Tuymans’s main contribution to contemporary art in the last twenty years has been his rethinking of the symbolic and narrative possibilities of figurative painting and the imagery in which it is grounded....Tuymans’s approach shows one possible avenue for making new kinds of meaning out of a technical vocabulary that many artists may have considered orthodox or even powerless. We see this trend toward overdetermined narratives in the work of many Chinese artists of his generation....And we see it mirrored in a younger generation of artists...for whom this kind of conceptual approach has opened up new possibilities off of the canvas.”
—Philip Tinari, Director and CEO, UCCA
“I painted Hearth using very thin washes of oil paint and wiped some of the paint away as if it were a monoprint or a watercolor. The fire is more densely painted. I was exploring a way to combine many contrasts: thick and thin, bright and dark, as a way of heightening the drama.”
—Lisa Yuskavage
“Yuskavage, a masterful colorist, makes lush, luminous, intentionally—and delightfully—gauche paintings that unsettle facile notions of misogyny, femininity and the female gaze.”
“I trust that, if I study something carefully enough, a greater essence or truth might be revealed without having a prescribed meaning… What connects all my work is finding the right balance between intention and chance, doing as much as I can and knowing when to let go, allowing fluidity and avoiding anything being forced.”
—Wolfgang Tillmans
"Tillmans has photographed the Shaker community several times now, returning to them as he has with other forms of community. Indeed, it is a community that—for all their differences—shares a great deal with those whom we might more readily associate Tillmans with, the groups of musicians and clubbers who come together in New York, London, or Berlin.”
—Tate: Arts and Culture