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.
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June 23, 2009 No Comments
Poetic and Pragmatic
The Rose Window at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
The New York Times by Holland Cotter has a nice article about light with lots of great little tidbits.
At this dark time of the year, we like light. So we have festivals of light: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve too, with its bright parties, and fireworks, and the fabulous walk-in lantern that is Times Square.
Poetic and pragmatic is an apt description of New York and its light. This is an island city — of its five boroughs only the Bronx is part of the North American mainland — with an island light, alternately obdurate and romantically moody. It can be too candid. Noon light in New York is not going to make you look rosy if you’re pale, or rested if you’re tired, or younger than you are. But its toughness is democratic: it falls on everybody and everything the same way.
Tags: Paint, luminosity, holland cotter, art, colors, new york timesWhen the poet John Ashbery described Porter’s colors as “transparent and porous, letting the dark light of space show through,” he might have been speaking of Hopper too, or of this Hopper at any rate. Like Porter’s art, Hopper’s exemplifies one version of American-style luminosity, painting that has some sort of spiritual dimension, but is also as unpretentiously humane as a piece of fine, body-friendly furniture. {Read More…}
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December 26, 2008 1 Comment
China’s Female Artists Quietly Emerge
Lin Tianmiao / Mothers!!! / Long March Space in Beijing, China
I know yesterday I said I was on vacation and taking a break etc…But today there is a good article in the NYTimes written by Holland Cotter about Chinese women artists
Tags: new museum, shanghai, holland cotter, chinese painting, Cui Xiuwen, contemporary artContemporary art in China is a man’s world. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that pantheon.
The new museums created to display contemporary art rarely give women solo shows. Among the hundreds of commercial galleries competing for attention in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere, art by women is hard to find.
Yet the art is there, and it is some of the most innovative work around, even as visibility remains a problem. On a monthlong stay, I visited several women who live and work in and around Beijing and have important careers, although none of them top the auction charts, and few are represented by prestigious galleries. An alternative list of women doing strong but little-noticed work would be long. [Read more...]
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July 30, 2008 No Comments