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

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Exhibited

    Pasadena, Pacific Asia Museum, I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cezanne and Other Words: Selections from the Chinese Avant-Garde and New Wave Art of the Eighties, 1989

  • Literature

    R. Strasberg, I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cezanne and Other Words: Selections from the Chinese Avant-Garde and New Wave Art of the Eighties, Pasadena, 1991 (illustrated); K. Smith, Nine Lives: the Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, Zurich, 2005, p. 48 (illustrated); H. Wu, ed., Wang Guangyi, Beijing, 2002, p. 188; M. Koppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-89, A Semiotic Analysis, Beijing, 2002, p. 153-161 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Wang Guangyi created his Post-Classicism series after the Frozen Northern Wastelands series (Lot 508), and prior to the Mao paintings (Lot 511) and the Great Criticism series (Lot 509). In the Post-Classical works he deconstructs European masterpieces such as Madonna and Child, Jacques Louis-David’s Death of Marat, and the Mona Lisa. In line with the artist’s goal at that time to “expunge humanist emotion from art,” the human subjects in these masterpieces are transformed into forms devoid of emotion; the paintings are identifiable only by their iconic forms and compositions.

    The Post-Classical works represent an important turning point in Wang Guangyi’s career. It is the first series in which he began subverting and appropriating historically important personalities, treating them as pure forms, and also in which he first experimented with the use of grid lines as an analytical tool. “In these works classical art and literary masterpieces are turned into objects of a dispassionate analysis. Later, the concept behind these images was categorized by the artist as ‘cleaning up humanist emotion’. These works can be understood as expressing Wang’s desire to maintain a sense of tension and expectation poised between the two poles of abstract, empty passion and a coldly rational critical stance. (H. Zhuan, “Cultural Utopian,” Wang Guangyi: Art and People, Sichuan, 2006)

512

Post-Classical Series: Madonna & Child

1988
Oil on canvas.
57 1/2 x 38 1/4 in. (146.1 x 97.2 cm).
Dated “ ’88.1” lower right.

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 

Sold for £333,600

China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection

The Farber Collection
13 October 2007, 7pm
London