|
The Directors of Marlborough
Gallery announce a memorial exhibition dedicated to the renowned
Chinese artist, Chen Yifei, who tragically died last year at the age
of 59. Chen was recognized as Chinas foremost realist painter during
his lifetime. Aside from his role as a much sought-after painter
Chen's protean creativity led him to great success in the worlds of
film and fashion. The exhibition will be held from January 9 through
February 3, 2007.
The exhibition will include thirty-three paintings and a
variety of works on paper dating from 1996 to 2004. A full range of
subjects will be on view, from Chen's homage to tile classical Chinese
woman in canvases such as Six Beauties, c. 1996-1998, to his
impassioned treatment of Tibetan country folk, as in Tibetan Mother
and Child, 1999, and a number of pastels depicting Tibetans in their
native dress. Also represented will be Chen's serene depictions of
Suzhou, China's "Venice of the North," and a number of lively figure
groups, which show Chen's deeply felt empathy and understanding for
his subjects' humanity.
Chen was directing his fourth movie at the time of his death
and many of the paintings in this exhibition reveal the artist's
cinematic eye: dramatic perspectives, extreme foreshortening, and a
Mannerist-like elongation of figures, particularly apparent in Young
Tibetan Father and Son, 1999, and Pensive Reclining Woman, 2001. In
this interior scene a lovely woman seen from above waits impatiently
for someone to arrive or something to occur. One might see a hidden
narrative in this painting, or see it as a film still where a sense of
longing and ennui is palpable.
Chen's particular path of artistic development
parallels the realities of enormous change in modern China. In an
artistic culture based on the respected traditions of the
scholar-painter-poet whose handling of centuries-old tools and
materials could gain an artist's immortality; Chen remained loyal to a
Western aesthetic. Some of his most prominent influences were the
French 19th century Barbizon painters, especially Jean-Francois
Millet, heroic Russian history paintings, and the films of the Russian
and Polish cinema. His earliest artistic training was completed at
Shanghai's High School for Art which he entered at the age of 15,
emerging at the top of his class four years later to enter the
Shanghai College of Arr. Like many artists of his generation he
painted in the Communist style dictated by the Cultural Revolution,
each work bearing its political purpose openly. After several years in
Shanghai and through travel in China, he began to develop a personal
style that moved away from propagandistic models.
Chen's early masterpiece was entitled Thinking of
History from My Space, 1979, a full-length self-portrait that doubles
as a monumental panorama of 20th Century Chinese history. This
powerful work, reviewed in Art News, provided Chen with an opportunity
for his first visit to America. Arriving in 1982, he stayed for a
number of years, earning his living as an art restorer and studying at
Hunter College in New York where he received an MFA in 1984. Chen
achieved considerable success through a number of solo exhibitions in
the 1980s. He began to exhibit with Marlborough Fine Art in London in
1995 and then in subsequent exhibitions with Marlborough New York.
This paralleled his return to China where two important exhibitions
were held in his native Shanghai in 1996 and in Beijing in 1997.
Entitled The Homecoming of Chen Yifei, these shows firmly established
the artist's stature in his own country, especially in Shanghai, where
today he is mourned as a national hero.
The Directors of Marlborough Gallery would like to
dedicate this Memorial Exhibition to Chen's memory, to his heirs, to
the artist's extraordinary talent, and to the vibrancy and imagination
of a great man. |
