Zhang Xiaogang - Editions & Works on Paper: Online Auction New York Wednesday, September 6, 2023 | Phillips

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  • There began the story that you, the shadow conjurer

    Will weave to open in me the eyes that the years have closed.

    In a slaty and gloaming sky, tattooed with musical notes

    Appears faraway like a ship

    On a sea of roofs: tortoise scales

    Or funeral stones

    The red city of the Forbidden.

    The painted border encloses this magical space

    Where fate will speed destiny's arrow.

    Red suddenly recalls blood, murder

    Sound and fury, hatred with its hyena's eyes

    A Rubicon we must not cross.

    Like you I have known Picasso's devilish cities Goya's nighttime vigils, heavy with hurricanes

    Carriers of Buñuel's dark sparks.

    • Provenance

      Property from a Private, New York Collection

    • Artist Biography

      Zhang Xiaogang

      Chinese • 1958

      Relying on memory and inspired by family portraits from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Zhang Xiaogang creates surreal, subtle artworks that explore the notion of identity in relation to the Chinese culture of collectivism. Using a muted, greyscale palette, Xiaogang repeatedly depicts a series of unnervingly similar figures, often dressed in identical Mao suits, to create an endless genealogy of imagined forebears and progenitors. Their somber, melancholy gazes are interrupted only by thin red bloodlines intimating familial links as well as occasional pale splotches of color resembling birthmarks.

      Xiaogang investigates how to express individual histories within the strict confines of a formula. His sitters, while appearing muted and compliant, are given physical exaggerations: oversized heads, tiny hands and long noses. These distortions imply stifled emotions and give a complex psychological dimension to the artist's work.

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56

Tiananmen, plate no. 2, from The Storyteller’s Enchantment

2009
Lithograph in colors, on Rives BFK paper, with full margins, contained in the original paper folio with red text in French, Chinese and English, tipped in (as issued).
I. 30 5/8 x 40 1/4 in. (77.8 x 102.2 cm)
S. 31 1/4 x 47 in. (79.4 x 119.4 cm)

Signed and numbered 'III/CXXX' in pencil, additionally signed by the author, Fernando Arrabal and numbered in pencil on the paper folio (the edition was 130 and 4 artist's proofs in Roman numerals), published by Delight Editions, unframed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$2,000 - 3,000 

Sold for $1,524

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Editions & Works on Paper: Online Auction

6 - 13 September 2023