Zhang Enli

15 January - 27 February 2010

London

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to announce Zhang Enli’s first solo exhibition in London. Zhang Enli has created a new series of works that continue to invest life into the most common of signifiers from details of trees and lace curtains to bare mattresses and rubber tubing. Imbuing his subjects with human relevance, he has said ‘I deal with reality in order to express something that goes beyond reality’ and as such he draws on the viewer’s desires for the most simple aspects of existence. Painting with thin washes of pigment, which often leave traces of turpentine dripping down the canvas, he achieves a sophistication and richness that balances the apparent simplicity of his technique and subject matter. Having grown up in the provincial town of Jilin in the north of China, his work continues to be strongly marked by his experience of this transition, 20 years ago, to the sprawling metropolis of Shanghai. He represents this extreme contrast to the smaller city he was accustomed to, not through the consumerist preoccupation so common in contemporary Chinese painting coming from its major cities, but by looking at the ordinary, unpretentious objects that surround him and the immigrants coming from the countryside to Shanghai. Zhang Enli’s paintings mark a strong departure from the frenzied and more fashionable work of his Chinese contemporaries – bearing no relation to ‘Political Pop’, ‘Kitsch Art’ or ‘Cynical Realism’ that infuses much of the work coming from his nation during the art boom of their post-socialist society in the nineties. A painter’s painter, Zhang Enli’s success has slowly infiltrated the international art world as a result of the continued positive reception of his work, and more recently due to solo shows in 2009 at Ikon Gallery, curated by Jonathan Watkins, and Kunsthalle Bern, curated by Philipe Pirotte. As well as his show with Hauser & Wirth, he will also have a solo show at Minsheng Art Museum in June of this year.

Installation views

About the Artist

Zhang Enli

Using the outside world as a mirror, Zhang Enli documents the more prosaic aspects of contemporary life. He regularly works with everyday objects that he is instinctively drawn to, for example a piece of string, a hose, or even a marble ball from the floor of his studio. Zhang Enli often magnifies his subjects until a specific fragment of a scene is depicted, as if enlarged through the viewfinder of a camera.

Within his figurative works, the perspective of each painting is often skewed to heighten the drama of the object’s shape, or to enlarge its importance. Zhang Enli’s expressive lines and curves are influenced by traditional Chinese brush painting, but are always underpinned by the structure of his pencil-drawn grids. The muted tones and loose washes of paint make the objects seem removed, as if occupying a liminal reality where only the essence of the object is portrayed on the canvas.

In his series of installations, known as Space Paintings, Zhang Enli paints directly onto the walls of a room to create immersive, nostalgic environments. These range from the abstract, where color and gesture recall sights and sounds of a particular place, to more figurative reproductions. The scale, and the lack of a traditional frame, alters the relationship between viewer and work, demanding the viewer retraces the steps of the artist and relives his experience of this physical space.

Anchored in figuration with descriptive titles, Zhang Enli’s most recent paintings seek to capture the ‘essence’ of his subjects rather than their physical representation. Within these works, Zhang Enli projects his own concerns and recollections onto the canvas, fusing the real and the imagined in highly personal impressions.

'Sometimes, the obscured object also creates a trace with the passing of time. This is the origin of my recent abstract paintings. When I look at a wall, or sky, it is full of traces, and then I name these traces after someone; it becomes very interesting, it is visible yet invisible.’—Zhang Enli