WEST BUND ART & DESIGN 2021

Highlights of the presentation include outstanding new pieces by George Condo, Rashid Johnson, Thomas J Price, and Avery Singer. Portrait of a Humanoid (2021) features alongside Condo’s largest solo exhibition in Asia, The Picture Gallery at the Long Museum (West Bund) and illustrates the artist’s ability to bend traditional techniques to unexpected ends. Combining acute psychological insight with a maddening physiognomic imagination, Condo’s portraits often seemingly compose a cast for a new theatre of the absurd, conflating comedy and tragedy. Rashid Johnson’s Bruise Painting “Until Until” (2021) is from his latest series ‘Bruise Paintings’, which can be seen as a collective ‘portrait’, suggesting the bruising realities of the past year while inviting reflection on possible paths to healing in a post-pandemic future.

Thomas J Price’s impressive bronze sculpture, Reaching Out (2021), depicts a young woman standing holding a mobile phone in both hands and continues Price’s theme of balancing experiences of isolation and connectedness, whilst acknowledging the different ways in which technology mediates our lives. Manifested from composite images, Price’s fictional characters function as psychological portraits, through which Price invites us to look deeper into our interpersonal experiences and the mental processes that inform them. In Dereliction Island (Study) (2021), Avery Singer continues to expand the limits of painting, blurring the lines between digital and analogue, abstraction and figuration, historical and contemporary narratives, clarity and ambiguity, and proposing an escape from our quotidian reality.

Also on view are Cindy Sherman‘s two Untitled works from 2016/2018, which expand her career-long investigation into the construction of identity and the nature of representation and highlight the fractured sense of self in modern society that Sherman has uniquely encapsulated from the outset of her career. The Surgeon (2020) is from Zhang Enli‘s recent abstract series of paintings, which focus on expressive new possibilities. The canvases do not depict an object or person as a truthful representation but instead as their essence. Made with a diverse palette and application, Zhang Enli projects his own concerns and recollections onto the canvas, fusing the real and the imagined, in highly personal impressions.

Additional standout works featured within the presentation include Louise Bourgeois‘s The Fear is Inside You!!! (2007) and fabric head sculpture Untitled (2001). Bourgeois was not concerned with traditional portraiture or an image of any one individual, but instead with the effect that the individual can have on another, and the emotional dynamic played out by the encounter with the other. With her fabric heads, she explores a range of psychological expressions and complex emotional states—love, sexuality, suffering, and death—through the heads’ features and the ways in which they have been constructed and sewn. Advant-garde Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo‘s work often explores metamorphosis and the symbiotic relationship necessary between human, technology and nature to emphasize a new ecology and utopia. In Meditation Between Memory and Future (1978), through biomorphic sculpture and assemblages incorporating found materials, he continued to investigate the relationship between the man made and the natural.