Wang Guangyi - China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection, Beijing

  • Literature

    M. Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China, Milan, 2007, p. 22 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    After 1985, Wang Guangyi created about twenty works in the “Frozen Northern Wastelands” series. From this series of works emerged abstract figures of upright backs of human images standing at attention (at first there were some finer details, such as the hairline parts, and afterward the images grew simpler), rounded shapes vaguely alike clouds, wide open terrain, the faraway pole, tranquil and forlorn atmosphere—all this constitutes the key features of the “Wastelands” series. In these works, the creator vehemently rejects the raison d’etre from human life experience, rejecting the wisdom and spontaneoity within feeling and emotion. Through abstraction’s form and spirit he expresses the main theme of a brand of lofty, serious principles. The artist says his works’ “express a lofty ideal and beauty, it includes the love of human essence’s conformity with eternity and health. In these works the creator and created experience a calm and weightiness, as well as beyond a happiness beyond meaning. M. Gao, Contemporary Chinese Art Volumes: Analysis of Oil Painting 1979-1999, Hubei, 1999, p. 20

508

Frozen Northern Wastelands Series - Big Dolls

1986 - 1988
Oil on canvas.
31 3/4 x 44 in. (80.6 x 111.8 cm).
Signed and dated “86-88 Wang Guangyi” along central lower edge.

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 

Sold for £156,000

China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection

The Farber Collection
13 October 2007, 7pm
London