NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery is presenting an exhibition of new paintings by renowned Chinese artist Wang Guangle. Wangs fourth international exhibition with Pace and third solo show in New York, Duo Color is on view at 510 West 25th Street from January 11 through February 9, 2019.
One of the preeminent contemporary abstract painters, Wangs work is rooted in an investigation of paintings temporality and in the power of the canvas as a vessel of labor and marker of time. He recalls an historical tradition of ancient Chinese scholars and approaches the act of painting as a daily practice for personal moral cultivation and spiritual exploration. This exhibition showcases a selection of 14 new acrylic on canvas paintings, which reflect the artists use of a uniform brushstroke and systematic application of paint. Wang applies each layer of paint beginning from the far edges of the canvas and working precisely inward to the center, creating a subtle gradation of color and the effect of an illuminated rectangle or void. This considered technique gives his paintings a potent illusionistic depth, with the varying tones of the composition acting as a subtle framing device for each work.
While in past series, Wang has focused each painting on a single hue, for this new series he has chosen pairs of contrasting colors. He slowly layers the pigments over days and months with a precision that makes one color appear to naturally progress to its oppositeevolving two originally conflicting colors into a harmonious one. Within Wangs practice and the cultural background from which his work emerges, the notion of color refers to a Buddhist concept used to capture the appearance of the material world, which is considered the result of the illusions and agonies of peoples minds. The artists diligent act of reconciling and uniting two opposing colors can be understood as the symbolic harmonization of the conflicting relationship between the physical and the spiritual worldsresulting in a final painting, which the artist describes as the shape of the psyche.
Wang Guangle (b. 1976, Songxi, Fujian Province, China), a pioneer of abstract and conceptual painting among his generation, studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he began exploring the potential of the painting surface as integral to his work. In 2003, he co-founded N12, a collective of twelve fellow graduates who began showing together as a means of securing exhibition space at a time when emerging Chinese art had yet to assert its place in the art market or critical discourse. The group came to represent a generation of diverse artists who developed their work two decades after the Cultural Revolution, unified by a break from formal representation toward individual expression. Wang quickly garnered critical praise for his process-based paintings, wherein the artist translates abstract qualities of the worldsuch as the passage of timeinto paint, simultaneously referring to the materiality of the medium and the act of painting through abstraction and repetition.