SALZBURG.- The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac announces the first exhibition in Salzburg of works by Yan Pei-Ming, a Chinese-born painter who has been working between Paris and Dijon (France) for over 30 years.
The defining element of Yan Pei-Ming’s pictorial style to date has been its bichromatic approach. The contrast between black and white – or, more rarely, between black and red – subtly varies nuances of light and shade and imbues each subject with a sculptural dimension. For some time now, however, the artist has been generously expanding his palette.
In this new group of works, Yan Pei-Ming explores a wider chromatic range, though remaining faithful to his style of vigorous and ample brushstrokes. Viewed close up, his paintings are powerfully abstract, but give way to a figurative intensity as one backs up to view them from a distance and as the contours of each subject re-emerge.
In his Aggressive Beauty exhibition, Yan Pei-Ming has opted to combine fundamentally different themes. Eminent figures drawn from the history of religion and art are juxtaposed here with the most savage animality. However, these visually disparate motifs, theoretically antinomic in nature, have a common denominator: power. The subjects express a muffled strength or an immediate brutality before revealing their potential to draw us in, even to mesmerize us.
In the spring of 2015, Yan Pei-Ming had a solo exhibition entitled No comment at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Malaga in Spain. A whole room is currently devoted to his work in the CHINA 8 show at the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst in Duisburg, Germany. Yan Pei-Ming’s oeuvre is represented in a number of major public collections, including those of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome; Louvre Abu Dhabi; Qatar Museums, Doha; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
The catalogue of this exhibition will include a text by Art Historian Hans-Joachim Müller.
