NEW YORK, NY.- LGDR will be working with China-based artist Zhang Zipiao, in collaboration with White Space gallery in Beijing. Zhang’s first solo exhibition with LGDR will go on view in New York City in 2023, and paintings by the artist will be featured in the gallery’s booths at the upcoming editions of Frieze Seoul (September 2022) and Art Basel Miami Beach (December 2022).
Known for her enigmatic large-scale paintings, Zhang has honed a nuanced visual language based upon intuitive brushwork and filled with abstracted anatomical elements of flora and fauna. Drawing inspiration from such historical masters as Gustave Courbet, Francis Bacon, William de Kooning, and Georgia O’Keeffe, she constructs brightly hued compositions of animal flesh and floral motifs. Zhang renders these with a distinctive graphic linework that reflects the influence of digital imagery, populating her canvases with flowers, fruits, vegetables, and flesh in a constantly evolving, resonant painterly world that she describes as “a fuller and more vibrant state of life.”
Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Co-Founder of LGDR commented, “Zhang Zipiao’s distinct hand, with her ribbons of juicy bold color, combined with strong physicality and unrest, place her as a central painter of her generation. We look forward to showcasing her new series next year, which follows her solo presentation at Salon 94 in 2021—a through-line demonstrating our continued support for her practice.”
Born into a family of noted artists in Beijing in 1993, Zhang went on to study painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). There she began to develop her own artistic sensibility, distinct from her both her immediate lineage and from traditional Chinese training. After graduating SAIC in 2015, Zhang returned to China and began developing her visual lexicon of recurring images—plant forms, sliced fruits and vegetables—to render metaphors for flesh and the fluid identities it contains. As Zhang continued these explorations, she expanded her vocabulary: the artist took photographs of carcasses at the local butcher and collected similar images from the Internet, drawing inspiration from the colors and contours to create her Battlefield and Floral Field series. In those works, Zhang renders the shapes, sinews, and hues of flesh and bone onto large canvas fields, with ribs structurally anchoring the center of the compositions. These series pay homage to Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954), a masterpiece in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago that left an immutable impression upon Zhang during her study at SAIC.
In her latest series, Zhang has merged her earlier explorations of flora and subsequent studies of flesh into a heightened form of abstracted representation. Named for flowers, these paintings emphasize the texture of interlocking petals while suggesting the surface of female flesh. Here Zhang both embraces and challenges entrenched tropes of female representation and the image of woman as object of delectation. The artist explains: “When it comes to flowers, people naturally think of traditional symbols of beauty. But on top of that, I wish to present more conflicting and confronting sides of the topic.”
“We are delighted to be working with Zhang Zipiao,” said Rebecca Wei, Co-Founder and Chairman of LGDR & Wei, Hong Kong. “She is one of the leading artists of the younger Chinese generation whose confidence, determination, and insight guide a clear vision of her practice and propel her to further it. Our work with Zhang echoes LGDR’s commitment to collaborating with artists at different stages of their careers and bringing Asian artistic voices to a broader international stage.”
Born in 1993 in Beijing, Zhang attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She has mounted solo exhibitions at Salon 94, New York (2021); White Space, Beijing (2020, 2018); Mine Project Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); Star Gallery, Beijing (2017); and Ying Space, Beijing (2015). Recently, her paintings have been included in group exhibitions at Pace Palo Alto (2021) and Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai (2020), among others. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo presentation at the Long Museum, Shanghai (2022), and a group show at the Song Art Museum, Beijing (2022) and the Nanchizi Art Museum, Beijing (2022). Her work resides in the collections of the K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; the Long Museum, Shanghai; and the Longlati Foundation, Shanghai.
