Xu Zhen was born in Shanghai in 1977. He graduated from Shanghai School of Arts and Craft in 1996. Xu Zhen is a multi-discipline artist who uses photography, installation and video in his practise. One of his most infamous pieces was “8.848-1.86” where he had the top 1.86m of the Mount Everest’s peak removed and later displayed with a video documenting the ascent. His works are often provocative and explore Chinese social matters. Over his decade’s long career, Xu Zhen has exhibited internationally, at museums and biennales, such as, Venice Biennale (2001, 2005), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2004), ICP (2004), Mori Art Museum (2005), PS1 (2006), Tate Liverpool (2007), etc. Xu Zhen’s curatorial experiments and engagement with an alternative art space and a website has complements and extends his conceptual practices.
Archives: Artists
A featured artist
Qiu Zhijie
Qiu Zhijie was born in Zhangzhou in 1969.He graduated from the printmaking department at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China in 1992. Trained as a print maker, Qui Zhijie works in a wide variety of media, including photography, video installations and calligraphy. He is recognised for his “conceptual photography”, for which he uses his body as canvas. He centres his works exploring the mundane and daily-life subject matters. In the installation Xin/Jin ( 1999) he playfully covered the walls of a room with Buddhist texts with a special ink that could only be read in the darkness, when the light came back, the visitor was surprised by a human heart suspended in a crystal recipient in the centre of the room, only to go back into darkness after every five second intervals. In Ten Tang Poems ( 2001), Qui Zhijie reflects on the relationship between cultural memory in relation with the passing of time. Video images are played backwards, so that the writing of important classical Chinese poems appear to be deleted.
Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou, He Nan Province in 1957. He graduated from the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1985. Guo-Qiang’s work is often associated with gunpowder, which he uses as a metaphor for the social climate and cultural tradition of China. He was selected as a finalist for the 1996 Hugo Boss Prize and won the 48th Venice Biennale International Golden Lion Prize and 2001 CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts. In 2008, he was subject to a large-scale mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which eventually traveled to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He also gained widespread attention as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
Adriana Varejão
Adriana Varejão was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1964. She is at the forefront of the Brazilian art scene and has increasingly become a key player in the international market. The existing auction record for her work is $1,527,980, achieved in February 2011 at Christie’s. Her body of work captures the traces of Portuguese colonialism and the dramatic consequences of the conquest of America on indigenous people. She works across multiple mediums such as painting, sculpture, installation, and photography, being most recognised for the use of tiles and flesh. White Tilework in Live Flesh (1999) is an installation that transforms the tiled wall into injured skin from which flesh is revealed violently from the inside and Corner Jerked-Beef Ruin (2003) is an impressive sculpture of a ruined wall built with blue tiles and filled with flesh, bones and blood. Yet the beautifully decorated tiles in a Portuguese baroque style suggest that her body of work is not only referencing colonial violence but also is about the nature of dichotomies. Her work has been acquired by Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum and the Zabludowicz Collection, among others. She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Guillermo Kuitca
Guillermo Kuitca was born in Buenos Aires in 1961. Considered a precocious artist, he had his first solo show at the age of 13 in Lirolay Gallery in Buenos Aires. He works across multiple mediums such as painting, drawing, and installation, being most recognised for the creation of large works with beds, city plans and road maps. Kuitca incorporated these elements into his work since the early 1980´s although they were not aimed to reference any specific geopolitical location rather than to evoke a psychological cartography of the “human obsessions”. Le Sacre (1992), which consists in maps painted onto fifty-four child-sized mattresses mounted on the wall, and Untitled (1992), twenty child-sized beds laying on the floor, suggest an aerial-viewed of a sort of abstract landscape where buttons indicate the location of major cities. From the same group of works were the pieces exhibited in Documenta 11, through which he gained international acclaim. Kuitca represented Argentina in the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, being one of only three artists to exhibit in the national Pavilion and in Robert Storr’s central international Biennale show. His works have been acquired by the MoMa, Tate, CIFO and Daros Collection, among others. Kuitca lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Cildo Meireles
Cildo Meireles was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1948. He is a key figure of the Conceptual Art movement in Brazil. The production of viewer-oriented projects by Neo-concrete movement artists such as Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape and Lygia Clark influenced his work and a whole generation of young artists´s emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. This group consistently produced politically and socially engaged works as a response to the oppressive military regime taking over from the early 1940s to the mid 1980s. He works across multiple mediums, being most recognised for the use of basic materials and commonplace objects. Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project (1970) is an iconic work that explores the notion of circulation of information. In this work Meireles modified Coca-Cola bottles printing critical political statements and returned them to the consumer network. Other insertions were produced in newspapers and on banknotes. Meireles began producing participatory environments in the early 1980´s, in which he is well recognised for the maze of broken glass ground entitled Through (1983–9), and the impressive installation composed of bones, gold coins and communion wafers commemorating the 17th Century Jesuit mission settlements in Southern Cone entitled Mission/Missions (1987). Tate Modern held a comprehensive retrospective of his work in 2008-2009. His works have been acquired by MoMa, Tate Modern and CIFO among others. Meireles lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Vik Muniz
Vik Muniz was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1961. He is at the forefront of the Latin American generation of contemporary artists as well as being one of the most vibrant figures in the international contemporary art scene. Muniz works using unconventional materials such as diamonds, sugar, garbage, wire drawing, dust, caramel, jam and sawdust to create strictly crafted-like paintings inspired mostly by iconic pieces from Art History. Yet these paintings are part of a process where the final artwork is a limited and small series of photographic images. Among his best-known works are a series of paintings entitled Pictures of Chocolate (1997), where he has re-produced emblematic images such as the Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monrow, and Chairman Mao with chocolate syrup. The Junk Series (1995) recreates Old Master paintings of classical gods and heroes with industrial rubble such as bottle caps, discarded tires, soda cans, and scrap metal. It was the three-years-production film Waste Land that increased his international exposure, not to mention its nomination for the 83rd Academy Awards. Muniz´s unique visual language has kept him away from any categorization to date; his work might be equally influenced by Pop artists such as Warhol, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns as much as Mannerist artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. His visual vocabulary does not necessarily address any local reference either and this has allowed him to secure a place within the international mainstream art market. His works have been acquired by MoMa, Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum and Israel Museum, among others. Muniz lives and works in New York.
Carlos Cruz Diez
Carlos Cruz Diez was born in 1923 in Caracas, Venezuela, and moved to Paris in 1960 where he became an influential artist of Kinetic Art. He works in various mediums such as painting, prints, sculpture, installation and interventions in public spaces. Through extensive research on colour, he has built a body of work consisting of a series widely known as Physichromie, Transchromie, Induction Chromatique, and Couleur Additive. These works are abstract compositions on chromatic surfaces where the sequence, repetition and juxtaposition of colours create the perception of movement.
Lygia Pape
Lygia Pape was born in Nova Friburgo, Brazil, in 1927. She was a key founder of Neo-Concrete movement in the 1960´s and an important member of Grupo Frente alongside Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. She worked across multiple mediums such as painting, drawing, installation, collage, performance and film, being most recognised for her series of installations entitled TtÈias. This work, which consists of fine and almost invisible golden threads geometrically located in the space, becomes only visible when they shine according to the position of the viewer. Even though her work incorporates key elements of modern European abstraction, she rebelliously re-interpreted it in line with her own local political and social context. Her early work places emphasis on bi-dimensional geometric compositions using basic forms and a limited colour scheme, moving then to a radical introduction of life itself as art through performance and film. Her work has been acquired by MoMa, MCNRS, Tate, among others. Pape died in Rio de Janeiro in 2004 at the age of 77.
Jesus Rafael Soto
Jesus Rafael Soto was born in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela in 1923 but developed his career in Paris where he became a pioneer of the Kinetic Art movement. He worked the mediums of painting, relief and installation although not in a conventional manner, which allowed him to represent vibration, movement, light, space and time. His extensive body of work consists of repetitions and variations of abstract systems more recognisable through the series of fine metallic constructions and glued elements on monochromatic striped backgrounds entitled Vibraciones and the iconic structures with fine and curved wires entitled Escrituras produced since 1959 and 1963 respectively. Soto was part of the group of Venezuelan and Argentine artists who settled in Paris in the 1950´s and were at the forefront of the kinetic movement through their association with the Denise Rene gallery, which began their support with the 1950 exhibition Le Mouvement. His work has been acquired by MoMa, MCNRS, Tate, Centre Georges Pompidou and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Soto died in Paris in 2005 aged 82.