NEW YORK, NY.- Pace is presenting History Painting, an exhibition of new paintings by the Beijing-based artist Li Songsong, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York from November 7 to December 20.

Showcasing a selection of paintings created this year, the presentation spotlights Li’s enduring engagement with history as both inspiration and substance for his work. History Painting is accompanied by an exhibition booklet from Pace Publishing featuring an essay by the gallery’s Curatorial Director, Xin Wang.

One of the most celebrated contemporary painters in China, Li has honed his distinct style—marked by his use of reliefs, bold brushstrokes, and solid color blocks—over the last 20 years as part of his pursuit “to paint something that had a certain distance from reality,” as he once put it. Contending with history, politics, and culture, Li’s art is forged in enactments of accumulation and subtraction, of exposure and obscuration. At once personal, imaginative, and truthful, his deeply expressionistic paintings often depict fragmented, semi-abstract figurations underpinned by narratives that the viewer is invited to decipher and absorb.

Over the last several decades, the artist has deconstructed and reconstructed recognizable images from newspapers, films, historical photographs, and other media, reinterpreting them through the lens of his own experiences and memories while also creating new textural dimensions within his works. In abstracting images from their original contexts, Li has cultivated a unique visual language that asks viewers to see the world in new terms—from a different aesthetic perspective.

“History has always been a prime substance, if not subject, throughout Li’s practice, and the artist works with it not as evidence, but as symptom and pathos,” Wang writes in her new text for the artist’s upcoming show. “It is not so jarring, then, that in his recent series explicitly titled History and Past, representational content has given way to the visceral and relational.”

In his presentation with Pace in New York, the artist, who has been represented by the gallery since 2009, shows new paintings from his body of work titled History, which he began in 2023. Entirely abstract, these paintings, all of which are square in format, can be understood as portraits of his ever-evolving relationship to the medium.

“This new group of works has lost its reliance on visual sources,” Li says. “I simply let the language extracted from (painterly) practice become the protagonist and construct a historical metaphor in the form of ‘painting.’”

Building up his compositions in grids as part of his process, Li uses color to express his state of mind at the moment the paint meets the surface of his canvases. He sees each of his brushstrokes as agentive and idiosyncratic, indelible and eternal even as they are folded ever deeper into the painterly layers and recesses of his works.