NYAB Event - Guo Hongwei "Things: New Works"

Guo Hongwei "Things: New Works"

Chambers Fine Art

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Chambers Fine Art New York presents Things: New Works by Guo Hongwei, a sequel to the highly successful exhibition held at Chambers Fine Art Beijing in August, 2009. 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 the United States.

Once Guo Hongwei 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. Early in 2009, 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 such as tooth-brushes, paper cups, rolls of toilet paper that he found lying around in his studio. For the New York exhibition he has continued the exploration of his immediate environment, focusing on motifs that range from “Artist’s Bubblegum” to a traditionally framed landscape in “Masterpiece.”

Guo Hongwei is representative of a new generation of contemporary Chinese artists who have moved beyond the political concerns of the generation immediately preceding him. Choosing to focus on his immediate surroundings, he is able to concentrate on the potential of his chosen medium, whether it be watercolor on paper or oil on canvas, to create surprising visual equivalents of objects that are mostly overlooked.