The oeuvre of Shanghai-based artist Zhang Enli has spanned a vast range of artistic concerns—from his figurative compositions of the 1990s and the unassuming depictions of everyday objects in the 2000s, to the turn towards installation and abstraction in his mature career.
Read MoreBorn in Jilin province, Zhang graduated from the Arts and Design Institute of Wuxi Technical University in 1989. He taught at the Arts and Design Institute of Donghua University, Shanghai, for several years until 2008.
When Zhang first began exhibiting in the 1990s, his paintings primarily comprised portraits of urban life in China. In his figurative compositions and still lifes, Zhang captured the daily lives of the working class—at work, smoking, eating, or socialising.
Zhang's 'Meat Market' series (1997) reflects a specific everyday urban experience that inspired Zhang at the time. The oil on canvas works are composed of expressionistic brushwork and an austere, gloomy colour palette which Zhang used to convey the despair and anxiety he had then experienced.
In the early 2000s, a significant shift occurred in the subject matter of Zhang's works, as the artist turned towards the meticulous depiction of everyday objects. This is seen in the 'Bucket' series (2007), in which a simple metal bucket is painted from different angles, on a large scale. In Bucket 8, the object is presented as seen from above so as to appear almost as an abstract circle; in Bucket 3, the perspective is as viewed from the side of the upturned bucket. Zhang's 'Bucket' paintings show an attentiveness to the banality of the commonplace, and draw attention to that which might otherwise go unnoticed.
In 2007, Zhang began producing his 'Space Paintings', a series of immersive mural installations painted directly on the walls of a room. Through this process, Zhang explored the influence of narrative gestures on the expression of memory in spatial structures.
In a conversation with Ocula Magazine on his exhibition, Space Painting (2013) at ICA Theatre, London, Zhang described the transition of subject matter in his practice: 'When I began painting objects, it was a change of thinking... In terms of my space paintings... I focus on the relationship between material and wall; space itself is structured, but people zoom around it'.
Zhang's solo exhibition, Looking Outwards (2022) at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz featured recent paintings and works on paper, reflecting the artist's experimentation with line, mark, and colour.
In works such as A Melancholic Person (2019), Zhang's structural approach is revealed through the faintly visible pencil-drawn grids. Forming the foundation of his compositions, these grids are painted over with sweeping washes of diluted paint—a characteristic evocative of traditional Chinese brush painting.Zhang's 'Born in the Year of the Tiger' series (2021) further demonstrate the artist's exploration of abstraction, with his fluid, gestural handling of the brush generating forms of varying opacities and thicknesses.
Zhang's work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions for several decades.
Select solo exhibitions include Looking Outwards, Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz, Switzerland (2022); A Room With Colour, Long Museum, Chongqing (2021); A Room That Can Move, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2020); New Paintings, Hauser & Wirth Zurich (2020); Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2019); Gesture and Form, Firstsite, Essex (2017); Intangible, Hauser & Wirth Zurich (2016); Space Painting, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2013).
Select group exhibitions include Rhythm and Refrain, Song Art Museum, Beijing (2022); City on the Edge: Art and Shanghai at the Turn of the Millennium, UCCA Edge, Shanghai (2021); Cache: From B to Z, ShanghART, Shanghai (2020); The Avant-Garde is Not Afraid of a Long March, ShanghART, Singapore (2019); The System of Objects, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2015); Kochi-Muziris Bienniale, Kochi (2012).
Hannah Zhang | Ocula | 2022
