Xie Lei - New Now London Wednesday, December 6, 2023 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • “We have flowed out of ourselves / Beginning on the outside”
    —Mina Loy, ‘The Dead’

     

    Xie Lei’s Swallow is a prime example of the Chinese artist’s ability to consolidate palpable tension and ambiguity. Disarmingly intimate in its closely cropped format, the head and shoulders of a reclining male figure are here rendered with rapid, expressive brushstrokes that delicately build up the subject’s flesh tones against a background of deep, swirling colour. His features erased above the arch of his upper lip, the subject is anonymised, powerfully suggestive of the violence of death’s erasure of identity and the poetic confluence of internal and external forces as life leaves our bodies. The privileged status of the body as occupying a border line between life and death formed the focus of the group exhibition Mouthed Echoes mounted by Lyles & King, New York in 2022. Taking its title from Modernist poet and visual artist Mina Loy’s poem ‘The Dead’, the exhibition presented a sensitive meditation on this theme, with Xie Lei’s Swallow occupying a notably prominent position.


    Xie Lei held the 2022 artist in residence position at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels and has continued to exhibit in a range of group and solo shows, most recently at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Kandlhofer in Vienna, and Lyles & King in New York all held earlier this year. Xie Lei’s works exude a poetic quietness which rests between tranquillity and distress, especially evident in the present work.

    • Provenance

      Lyles & King, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      New York, Lyles & King, Mouthed Echos, 8 January - 5 February 2022

2

Swallow

signed, titled and dated 'Xie Lei Swallow Xie Lei [in Chinese] 2021' on the reverse
oil on linen
40.6 x 50.2 cm (15 7/8 x 19 3/4 in.)
Painted in 2021.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£6,000 - 8,000 ‡♠

Sold for £13,970

Contact Specialist

Charlotte Gibbs
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now
+44 20 7901 7993
CGibbs@phillips.com
 

New Now

London Auction 6 December 2023