Often producing monochromatic works in a dark palette of mixed colours, Xie Lei can perhaps be best described as a symbolist painter. Ancient rituals, traditional Chinese imagery or Western mythology form the subjects of many paintings. They are bathed in a suggestive and sometimes mysterious atmosphere reminiscent of ancient folktale and primeval epochs.
Read MoreIn Xie Lei's paintings, animals and plants are personified and seem to acquire a personality of their own, while human characters are intimately incorporated in their environment, forming one with nature. While these environments are depicted by conventional signs, Xie Lei often eschews delineating ground from sky, proximity from depth and foreground from background, thereby deliberately confusing the viewer's sense of time and space and disseminating a sense of ethereality into paintings that look no more like windows into a new world but as symbolist talismans facing the viewer. This diaphanous ambiance is contrasted and balanced by a very painterly technique, with large patches of colors made up of visible brushstrokes producing a sense of spontaneity: they are manifestly the legacy of an individual imagination rather than objective artefacts.
Xie Lei was born in 1983 in Huainan China, and graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, and received his PhD (practice-based) in visual arts in 2016 from the École normal supérieure and the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris where he still lives and works since 2006. His work is included in public and private collections, such as Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL) and Burger Collection. Notable solo exhibitions were staged at Yishu 8 Beijing, Galerie Anne de Villepoix Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts Paris, Z Gallery Arts Vancouver. Besides, his works were included in group shows at MAC VAL, the Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration, Langen Foundation and White Space.
Text courtesy HdM GALLERY.
