Li Xubai 李虚白– Clear Rhythm of Brook and Mountain
It’s been a dark couple of months and try as I might I just haven’t been able to get my mind to focus on any art work. Instead of painting or drawing or going to exhibits I’ve been sitting on my ass watching Discovery Channel and fuminating on how much typesetting applications and forms for investment funds just plain sucks! Well the last few days I’ve been trying to drop kick my skull out of this funk by getting outside and here’s some nice landscape work by Li Xubai 李虚白 that’s showing now at Goedhuis Contemporary.
Li Xubai / Clear Rhythm of Brook and Mountain / 2008 / Ink and color on paper / 25 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches (65.5 x 65.5 cm) / Goedhuis Contemporary
From the gallery:
Li Xubai’s work exemplifies the interpretation of much of the best Chinese traditional painting in that it subtly incorporates very contemporary stylistic themes embodied in an ostensibly classical aesthetic. It is this openness to the contemporary world that is so elusively expressed in these lyrical landscapes of what appear to be a traditional pictorial style.
Ten years ago in the NY Times Holland Cotter had this to say about Li Xubai:
His stippled, daublike brush technique creates an illusion of tangible form through tonal modeling (the effect is a bit like digital graphics). Yet nothing feels reliably solid. Rock outcroppings have a fungal sponginess; waterfalls are bursts of white light; mountain ranges hang suspended in air. The notion of the painted landscape as a mirror of subjective states here takes on a literal, anatomical cast, with streams and fissures suggesting blood vessels, sinews and musculature. {Read More…}
Li Xubia @ Goedhuis Contemporary 42 East 76th Street thru July 31.
Tags: holland cotter, traditional chinese painting, li xubai, watercolor, landscape
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