HOLY PAINTING

Curator: Sun Dongdong

OPENING : 2015.10.17 3: 00PM

Venue : D06 798 Main 2ndStreet，798 Art Zone，No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road ,Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

Preface

By SunDongdong

As the second solo exhibition of Liu Xia, Holy Painting presents his reflection of “painting”in the post-historical context. Here, “painting” is defined as an object of knowledge between the sacred and the secular, just like the word “Holy” in the title which mean sadorable and is also frequently used in vulgar spoken language. The contradiction in language meets certain kind of psychology when contemporary artists facing their canvases: the admirable painting tradition and the working anxiety afterthe end of painting. Therefore, Liu Xia went back to the history of figurative painting and searched for inspiration. Like a time traveler who changes the history, he intentionally borrowed or captured some masterpieces of different times and styles to refigure – those of Tiziano, Rubens, Velazquez, Boucher, Poussin,Courbet, Manet, etc. For the artist, this intentionality is not a review of the past glorious painting. Instead, he tried to analyze the secular humor and vitalityin the sacred and serious knowledge discourse. For instance, he reversed Manet’s classic dark logic in a portrait of an imaginary black doctor wearing a white uniform, which looks like a negative film of Manet. And in a series entitled SiameseTwins, he deliberately compressed the space between two bodies into a plane,which defined the meaning of the subject by its negative space. Such restrained rhetoric sustains the artist’s dignity as a painter.