Zhang Zipiao

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Co-Founder of LGDR commented, ‘Zhang Zipiao’s distinct hand, with her ribbons of juicy bold colour, combined with strong physicality and unrest, place her as a central painter of her generation. We look forward to showcasing her new series next year, which follows her solo presentation at Salon 94 in 2021—a through-line demonstrating our continued support for her practice.’

Born into a family of noted artists in Beijing in 1993, Zhang went on to study painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). There she began to develop her own artistic sensibility, distinct from her both her immediate lineage and from traditional Chinese training. After graduating SAIC in 2015, Zhang returned to China and began developing her visual lexicon of recurring images—plant forms, sliced fruits and vegetables—to render metaphors for flesh and the fluid identities it contains. As Zhang continued these explorations, she expanded her vocabulary: the artist took photographs of carcasses at the local butcher and collected similar images from the Internet, drawing inspiration from the colours and contours to create her Battlefield and Floral Field series. In those works, Zhang renders the shapes, sinews, and hues of flesh and bone onto large canvas fields, with ribs structurally anchoring the centre of the compositions. These series pay homage to Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954), a masterpiece in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago that left an immutable impression upon Zhang during her study at SAIC.

In her latest series, Zhang has merged her earlier explorations of flora and subsequent studies of flesh into a heightened form of abstracted representation. Named for flowers, these paintings emphasise the texture of interlocking petals while suggesting the surface of female flesh. Here Zhang both embraces and challenges entrenched tropes of female representation and the image of woman as object of delectation. The artist explains: ‘When it comes to flowers, people naturally think of traditional symbols of beauty. But on top of that, I wish to present more conflicting and confronting sides of the topic.’

Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan