Li Songsong Exhibition

Pace Gallery (540 W 25th St.)

This event has ended.

2nd Floor

Li Songsong will feature new paintings that focus on the artist’s continuing exploration into the ambivalent relationship between time and social information. Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S. since 2011,these recent works animate the fragmentary nature of images and memory, paying attention to the people, events, and themes of modern and contemporary Chinese history. Inspired from photographs, the artist reconstructs images with layers of paint often section by section creating abstract and purposefully ambiguous paintings that are left up to the interpretation of the viewer. Presenting pieces of a story, Li opens the distance between the original and the transcript.

Richard Tuttle, basis, 70s Drawings will feature a total of ninety-three drawings by the pioneering conceptual artist Richard Tuttle. Split into two bodies of work from the early to late 1970s, the exhibition reflects a period of enormous change in the art world, which was being redefined by artists like Tuttle, whose practice embraced the experiential qualities of art and blurred the lines between mediums. This exhibition offers a unique glimpse into the formative years of Tuttle’s groundbreaking creative process, which elevated the medium of drawing by placing it on the same stage as painting and sculpture. Presented together for the first time, these works are visual thoughts and poems that resonate the youthfulness and innovative period of when they were made, while simultaneously opening new doors for reinterpretations and ideas about art, philosophy, and life.

Li Songsong (Chinese, b. 1973, Beijing, China) is renowned for his thickly layered paintings that animate the fragmentary nature of images and memory, paying particular attention to the people, events, and themes of modern and contemporary Chinese history.

Li graduated from the Subsidiary School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1992 and received a B.F.A in oil painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996. By the early 2000s, Li began to show his prominent style of heavily painted surfaces drawn from found imagery and mass media. These early works, such as Policemen (2001) and Big River (2001), are characterized by a distinctly monochromatic palette that express the haziness of memory and the impact of both historic and quotidian imagery. Li’s first solo exhibition Public Auction – Work Horse at Qinghua University of Fine Arts, Beijing (2001), would highlight this distinct style. In 2002, Li was one of the first to inhabit a studio in the famous 798 Art District in Beijing, during which time he began to include multiple color schemes into his work and increasingly add more extraordinarily thick and layered pigments.