Things
New Works by Guo Hongwei

August 27- October 24, 2009
Opening Reception: 4-7pm, August 27, 2009

On August 27, 2009 Chambers Fine Art Beijing is pleased to announce the opening of Things: New Works by Guo Hongwei. Born in Chongqing in 1982, Guo Hongwei graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2005 and has lived and worked in Beijing since then. This will be his first solo exhibition in China.

Once he left art school, he soon abandoned the traditional approach that characterized the teaching at the Academy. Favoring subject matter drawn from his childhood and often working from photographs in his family photo-album, during the next three years he painted a series of works that were notable for their inventive handling of the medium. Seeking to disturb the slick surface of the oil paint, he diluted it with turpentine and splashed it with water in order to create unanticipated effects. Beginning earlier this year, however, after a period of seclusion in Chongqing, he began to focus on more purely formal concerns, creating an inventive form of still-life from objects that he found lying around in his studio. The familiar forms of tooth-brushes, rolls of toilet-paper, a battered chair or a paper cup are isolated in the center of pristine white canvases or sheets of paper and continue the autobiographical approach while abandoning particular references to his childhood and adolescence.

Contrasting with the oil paintings is a series of large-scale water colors based on family photographs but rendered mysterious by their significant scale and dramatic chiaroscuro.

Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated catalog with introductory essay by John Tancock.