For this second edition of Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms, Galerie Urs Meile will focus on a selection of new works by emerging and established contemporary artists. Our presentation will include works by Marion Baruch, Ju Ting, Shao Fan, Rebekka Steiger and Xie Nanxing.
The artists represent four generations and with Europe and China two continents as their cultural reference. Three of them also share the fact that their individual museum presentations had to be closed in the past few months due to the current Covid-19 pandemic. Do the artists reflect the importance of their now reopened exhibitions differently than before the pandemic? How does art work in exceptional situations? Accompanying the Online Viewing Room, Galerie Urs Meile invites collectors to a virtual museum visit to the reopened exhibition of Shao Fan at HET Noordbrabants Museum and also to a live talk with painter Xie Nanxing from his studio in Beijing about his personal portraiture style.
Since the 1960s, Marion Baruch (b. 1929 in Timișoara, Romania, lives and works in Gallarate, Italy) has been exploring timely societal and political issues in her work through a large array of media. Over the decades, she created small objects, large installations in public spaces, small-scale events, and extensive social projects. Even today, as Baruch returned to Italy to work with fabric remnants from the prêt-à-porter clothing industry, she still embraces the social issues behind industrial production processes and our misuse of resources. The Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland is currently showing the first major retrospective dedicated to the artist, Innenausseninnen, running until October 11, 2020. The retrospective will then travel to the following institutions: MAGASIN des horizons, Grenoble; Museo MA*GA, Gallarate; Muzuel de Artă, Timișoara and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse.
Ju Ting (b. 1983 born in Shandong Province, lives and works in Beijing, China) began as a printmaker, studying in the print department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and under the tutelage of one of its most interesting artists, the print-maker and painter Tan Ping. As a student she had gravitated already towards painting, but was, from the first, far from committed to conventional expression. She began to experiment with her most familiar language of printmaking, but instead of carving copper plates or woodblocks, she cuts through layers of paint slathered onto the flat surface of a wooden board. Her practice can hardly be simplified as abstract painting, although she has clearly excluded representational content from her work. In both of her on-going series, 'Untitled' and 'Pearl', the artist applies numerous layers of acrylic paint on top of each other onto a wooden panel, until obtaining a certain thickness. She then manipulates and models the stacked layers of colour by hand or using tools. In the end the cut, folded, peeled or torn layers of colour present a certain plasticity, as if form is organically generated from within the image.
Shao Fan (b. and lives 1964 in Beijing, China): In 2018, Shao Fan's first European retrospective YOU at the Ludwig Museum (Koblenz, Germany) provided a comprehensive thirty-year overview of his artistic practice. YOU then traveled to the Suzhou Museum (Jiangsu, China). In February 2020, the HET Noordbrabants Museum ('s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands) opened a retrospective dedicated to Shao Fan titled Shao Fan: Between Truth and Illusion (until October 18, 2020) displaing paitings, ink drawings and furniture. A public virtual tour through the exhibition will be hosted for all Online Viewing Room visitors. Shao Fan occupies a distinctive position on the Chinese contemporary art scene, having developed a unique artistic language over the years. He employs highly personalised painting methods to transfigure familiar subjects and motifs (i.e. hare, monkey, and mountains). Using the classical ink drawing as his painting technique and zooming in on his subjects from Chinese culture like the hare, he places the beholder in, so to speak, an oversize confrontation with the motif. The result is an idiosyncratic tension between closeness and distance that is direct and puzzling at the same time.
Rebekka Steiger (b. 1993, lives and works in Zurich, Lucerne and Beijing) is one of the most exciting young painters of Swiss contemporary art. In 2018 Rebekka Steiger went to Bejing, China, as the gallery's artist-in-residence. Steiger's stay was followed by her first solo exhibition abroad. She continued working on her distinctive style during her extensive stay in China, which allowed her more freedom of mind. Through a layer-by-layer colour rendering, Steiger transforms her perception of emotions and atmospheres into mysterious and delicate art pieces while achieving unexpected visual results. The tension between abstraction and representation, the expressive rendering of bright colours and the use of non-narra-tive figurative motifs make her work not only intriguing, but also unsettling. The works fascinate with their shimmering between dream and reality as well as the abundance of hints that activates and captivates the imagination of the viewer. The Kunstmuseum Grenchen in Switzerland is presenting her solo exhibition boxing the compass until September 20, 2020.
Xie Nanxing (b. 1970 in Chongqing, lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu, China) is a revolutionary and experimental painter, who always challenges tradition and the seemingly established rules of art education. He is interested in psychology and also approaches his practice with a psychologist's line of questioning, inquiring into what is behind the surface. As a consequence, he reconsidered the traditional portrait genre, depicting people not as it is usually done, by painting their appearance, but by illustrating their personality through a story, the composition, or through color. For example, he might characterise someone by his style of driving or his job. Xie Nanxing's approach differs for every portrait, depending on and reflecting upon the person who is to be portrayed. Galerie Urs Meile will hold a talk with the artist about his personal portraiture style as part of the accompanying Online Viewing Room VIP Events.
Gallery Statement:
Since its establishment in 1992, Galerie Urs Meile has contributed to the presentation and dissemination of contemporary art, from painting and sculpture to photography, installation and video. The gallery is working from two locations: Lucerne (Switzerland) and Beijing (China). While its center of operations is based in Switzerland, the Beijing gallery has established itself as an international meeting place for collectors, curators, artists and aficionados of the arts.
Galerie Urs Meile was one of the first international galleries to focus on the Chinese art scene and has been working on an international level with Chinese artists since 1995. The gallery represents established artists such as Wang Xingwei, Xie Nanxing, Qiu Shihua, Not Vital, Tobias Rehberger (in Asia), as well as emerging artists such as Cao Yu, Chen Fei, Cheng Ran, Li Gang, Zhou Siwei, Hu Qingyan and Julia Steiner.