Zeng Fanzhi - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 14, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Wedel Fine Art, London

  • Exhibited


    London, Wedel Fine Art, Zeng Fanzhi: Painting, October 10 – November 10, 2006

  • Literature


    Wedel Fine Art, ed., Zeng Fanzhi: Painting, London, 2006, p. 25 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    From the recent abstract landscapes series of Zeng Fanzhi, the present lot is a massive saga, elaborating in visual details, repeating the familiar and unfamiliar. It tells stories, reveals the unexpected and reports the unforeseen; and all of these are realized during the creation of this painting. It does not tell a story that already exists, but rather, this painting is merely a beginning of endless possibilities. Hence it does not have any intrinsic boundaries of storylines; it can be unfolded in whichever way that you would like to interpret the painting, just like the ambiguous ending of a magnificent movie.
    "In this state of ephemerality, of fluidity, of unconcludedness, lies, perhaps, one of the most important and most specific elements of his art. Just as the swirling brush strokes, through their division and separation, concentration and diffusion, accompanies by dramaticemotional, connotative-narrative light and shadow effects, freely, inexorably and unceasingly bring new formations into being, introduce new stories and create landscape visions, human bodies or portraits out of the paint he puts on canvas, only to melt them down and transform them again, so, too, do Zeng Fanzhi’s pictorial situations evolve, as if a large-scale visual epos with many parallel strands were unfolding, continually weaving new subplots into the central story line and incorporating new particulars and new details into an opulent, all-encompassing whole,"
    (L. Hegyi, “The Visual Epos of Zeng Fanzhi,” China’s Neo Painting, A Triumph Over Image: 2007, Nanjing, 2007).

25

Little Boy

2006
Oil on canvas.
70 3/4 x 110 1/4 in. (180 x 280 cm).

Signed and dated “Zeng Fanzhi [in Chinese and English] 2006” lower right.

Estimate
$250,000 - 300,000 

Sold for $446,500

Contemporary Art Part I

14 May 2009, 7pm
New York