FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
WARHOL AND
MAO
A Solo Exhibition of Paintings by Zeng
Fanzhi
Fabien Fryns Fine
Art
October 2 – December 4,
2010
Opening: Saturday, October 2, 2010, 5-7
p.m.
(Los Angeles – August 2010) Fabien Fryns Fine Art in Los
Angeles will present an exhibition of works by Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi. The
exhibition – consisting of 3 “Warhol” and 3 “Mao”
portraits – is the artist’s, one of Chinese contemporary art’s
brightest stars, first solo show on the West Coast. The exhibition opens on
October 2, 2010, from 5 to 7p.m. and ends on December 4, 2010. This exhibition
coincides with the launch of the new monograph “Zeng Fanzhi”
published by Hatje Cantz which includes a foreword by Fabien Fryns and a text by
Dr Richard
Shiff.
The natural inclination with an exhibition like this is to make comparisons
between Zeng Fanzhi and Warhol. In Warhol’s “Mao” prints (as
in his “Marilyn Monroe” and his own self portrait prints), his
candied repackaging of global pop icons not only serves to monumentalize his
subjects—more importantly, it establishes and propagates brand Warhol
itself. Not Andy Warhol as an individual or as an artist, but Warhol as a
globally traded commodity.
Zeng Fanzhi’s “Mao” and “Warhol” portraits
operate on the opposite end of the scale. Where Warhol’s work existed for
the public arena and played heavily with motifs of mechanical reproduction, Zeng
Fanzhi’s work is very much a private affair. There is a distinctly
personal quality to each of the artist’s frenetic, gestural strokes. As
with his earlier portraiture work and even the mask paintings for which the
artist is most widely recognized, Zeng Fanzhi’s “Mao” and
“Warhol” paintings possess an intimacy that the artist Andy Warhol
never achieved—a one-on-one engagement between artist and subject, artwork
and viewer. Painting with two or more brushes simultaneously, Zeng Fanzhi uses
one brush to describe his subjects while he lets others meander across the
canvas. The technique transforms each work into near abstraction to render his
iconic subjects partially indiscernible, consequentially reapportioning their
celebrity and re-humanizing their larger-than-life
status.
Despite Zeng Fanzhi’s own similar stature in international art
– in 2008 he set an auction record for Asian contemporary art with his
"Mask Series 1996 No. 6" which sold for US $9.7 million, through
Christie’s, Hong Kong – the artist seemingly seeks not to trade upon
the currency of his success. Instead he looms as the proverbial outsider peering
in. Within each painting is an attempt to initiate a cultural dialogue between
the East and West, and within each painting is Zeng Fanzhi’s
characteristic philosophical playfulness—one in which he expresses an
interest in (and perhaps even a tacit reconciliation with) the foundations of
his own ascendancy in contemporary
art.
Zeng graduated in 1991 from Hubei Academy of Fine Arts. His early paintings
are immediately recognizable by their signature expressionistic strokes, that
lend provocative sensations of underlying violence and agony to his lavishly
rendered
canvases.
Upon moving to Beijing, he began his celebrated Mask series in 1994. Later
he painted a series of portraits of friends and colleagues to reveal
psychological human conditions and inner
personalities.
The focus of Zeng Fanzhi’s works has shifted in recent years from
depicting the people in a fast-changing society to exploring the mind landscapes
of human beings, whereby their experience of existence in society is revealed in
both philosophical and aesthetic
terms.