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展览简介

身外之物——赵刚新作展

Useless Things – Zhao Gang New Works

开幕：2017年03月05日 14:00 - 17:00

Opening: 2pm – 5pm, March 05, 2017

展期：2017年03月05日—— 2017年05月05日

Exhibition: March 05, 2017 – May 05, 2017

赵刚这批新作是个体经验在特定社会政治语境下的扭曲呈现。这些画的题材是以往探索的延续——知识分子的肃清以及留在那个时代的情感创伤。画面中盆栽的植物和花果，象征着那个时代里的小资情怀；植物与知识分子的头脑被武断地联系在一起，面对共产主义意识形态的洗劫，这些植物代表一种不正当的反抗意识。赵刚成长在那个时代，少年的他亲眼目睹了这些植物是如何从社会中被根除的。直到今天，那些片段的记忆仍时常牵扰着他。

赵刚开始学画的时候，练习静物和风景写生，他却在这个过程中开始质疑什么是“好的”静物绘画。对于绘画这种艺术媒介，如何去挑战传统的认知，经常成为赵刚创作的出发点，于是他寻求消解传统绘画。当回顾马蒂斯的早期作品以及莫奈时，他却即刻被触动和感染了。这恰恰显示出赵刚绘画身份的矛盾性——借以当代的表达，实则遣怀浪漫。最近，赵刚开始重新审视1920年代开始的中国现代油画。这段历史基本上被认为是对西方油画的模仿，并且畏惧离经叛道。

这批新作充斥着赵刚方式中的忧虑（他的角度、用色、形式处理和构图），试图为脆弱的存在进行谈判。

Zhao Gang’s new body of work is contorted with personal and social-political contexts.  These paintings’ subject matter is a continuation of previously explored themes—the purge of intellectuals and the emotional wounds that scarred their period of history.  The potted plants and fruit trees of these paintings were, at the time, seen as symbols of bourgeois thinking, due to the arbitrary connections drawn between the plants and the intellectuals’ minds.  In turn, these plants came to represent illicit thoughts in defiance of the communists’ ideological purification.  Gang grew up during that time; he witnessed how these plants were removed from society during his childhood.  To this day, he is haunted by periodic thoughts about them.

When Gang learned to paint, he practiced with still lives and landscapes, from which he became filled with doubt about what can be a “good” still life painting.  How to challenge conventional ideas of painting as an artistic medium often serves as a point of departure for Gang, from which he pursues deconstructions of traditional painting.  And yet, he is immediately moved and impressed when he revisits Matisse’s early work and the works of European masters like Monet.  Such is the conflict of his painterly identity - adopting a contemporary pretext while at the same time remaining a romantic.  Most recently, Gang has taken up challenging the notion of contemporary Chinese oil painting as it has developed since the 1920s, throughout which oil painting has been known as a copy of European painting or afraid of being unorthodox.

Looking at these paintings, one can see that they are fraught with the anxiety of Gang’s approach (in his angle, coloration, treatment of form, and composition), though which he strives to negotiate fragile existence. 

赵刚工作室

Zhao Gang Studio

02/20/2017