【Leo Gallery丨West Bund Art and Design】Tan Ping - Booth N307 11.7-11.10

谭平 Tan Ping

West Bund Art and Design丨Booth N307

2019.11.7-11.10

Schedule:

VIP Opening:

11.7 Thursday丨12:00-20:00

11.8 Friday丨11:00-12:00

Public Days:

11.8 Friday丨12:00-19:00

11.9 Saturday丨10:00-19:00

11.10 Sunday丨10:00-19:00

Venue: West Bund Art Center, 2555 Long Teng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai

Leo Gallery is thrilled to participate in West Bund Art & Design 2019, presenting the works on oil painting and mix material on paper of Tan Ping, who is one of the most important Chinese abstract artists, as well as the vice-president of Chinese National Academy of Arts.

Tan Ping studied in Germany in the late 1980s. In his 40-year artistic practice, Tan Ping has always been exploring in the fields of painting, printmaking, multimedia, design, etc. His abstract creation has always used the painting techniques of multiple layers covering and linear writing. “Physicality” and “handfeel” are the representative figures of his expression.

Artist Statement

The Seaming of Fragments

Every artist wants to draw a perfect picture. But I don’t know why, I can only use the bitty fragments to make a collage of seemingly beautiful one. These unrelated pieces are accidentally collaged by me in some day, at some point, and are seamed together by lines. The lines in the pictures are incoherent, whether with changed colour or with changed direction. The crossing line symbolizes the questioning of beauty and reality.

I think that today's world looks very beautiful on the surface, but under the cover of this surface are the torn pictures, they are misplaced, opposite and tangled, full of contradictions.

Today, many things happened are completely inconsistent with the logic of the past. This uncertainty makes us unable to predict the future. When you look around, the world seems to be a prosperous scene, but the whole earth in the deep has already been riddled with wounds.

—Tan Ping

Different from his previous painting series, Tan Ping uses printmaking language as the creative form in his paper series. With the technique of woodcarving, and the assistance of a series of overlapping combinations of lines, color blocks, collages and the experiments of various material media, he created the uncertain creative fields, which brings the viewers with unique visual experience.

In this series of creation which combines printmaking and painting, the spatial order constructed by painting, stacking, covering and collage reflects the artist's in-depth exploration and reflection on the subject consciousness. On the one hand, the multiple visual relationships among colors, lines and picture background imply that the interaction and balance in space and time have been formed in the procedure of deconstruction and reconstruction. On the other hand, the presentation of the uncertain lines leaves space for thinking. In the era surrounded with the self-media, people try to construct the picture of utopia through perfect images. In comparison, the broken edges, crossing lines and overlapping collages in the artist's works are questioning the relationship between beauty and reality. As the artist articulates: "different texture, colors, levels in the continuous collage combination are like the constantly encounter and collide of visual inspirations." Behind the collision of visual inspiration is imprinted with contradiction, dislocation, opposition, appearance...

The paper series continues the creation idea of the artist. If the artist's early study of printmaking aroused his attention on a variety of experimental creative media, and the five-year study in Germany gave him a clear perception of the painting language, then his subsequent life experience has become the source of the abstracted emotions. With all these preparation, he completed the discussion on the motif of life, time, and space. His artistic attempts experienced from the realistic expression to the abstracted form, then to the abstraction of free will, from objective visual representation to subjective spiritual expression. During these attempts, Tan Ping has always constructed his distinctive characteristics and the unique logic of his works in the process of accidental and frequent discovery of the dual art forms. What is shown in this series of works is his pursuit of “print” texture in printmaking, the accidental and coincident finding on the process of printmaking, as well as the unknown creative experience in the concept of printmaking.