randian | 燃点

For the first edition of Condo Shanghai, AIKE is pleased to host Peres Projects, Koppe Astnerand Soy Capitan and present the exhibition featuring three emerging painters: Ajarb Bernard Ategwa, Grace Weaver and Wang Xiaoqu. Each of the artists from different continent explores the theme of figure painting with distinct approaches.

阿贾布·伯纳德·阿特格瓦，《今天是星期二》，布面丙烯，199 x 178 cm，2018
Ajarb Bernard Ategwa, Today Is Tuesday, Acrylic on canvas, 199 x 178 cm, 2018 (Courtesy of artist and Peres Projects)

Ajarb Bernard Ategwa was born in 1988 in Cameroon, he lives and works in Douala, Cameroon. Ategwa’s large format works mimic the scale of city scapes and public spaces, and his vivid color palette and graphic style speak the language of advertising familiar to inhabitants of Douala, Cameroon’s largest city and economic capital. With a unique use of line and color, Ategwa weaves together these urban scenes, sounds and smells to create a rich sensory immersion. By using imagery lifted directly from present day Cameroon, Ategwa’s work counters these generalizations about the African experience with a nuanced perspective. While deeply linked to the artist’s time and place, Ategwa’s abstract rendering ofthe human figure opens the door for all of us to see ourselves in his tableaux.

格蕾丝·韦弗，《一个女孩的肖像(2)》，布面丙烯，33 x 25.5 cm，2018
Grace Weaver, Portrait of A Girl (2), Acrylic on canvas, 33 x 25.5 cm, 2018 (Courtesy of artist and Koppe Astner & Soy Capitan)

Grace Weaver wasborn 1989 in the United State, she lives and works in New York, US. Weaver’s artistic practice aims to contribute a “girly” perspective to the history ofoil painting. Mostly picturing multi-figure scenes, each of her compositions depends on a tightly managed under-painting whose forms rhyme and interlock tocreate the effect of a broad candy-colored tessellation. Within the discourseof painting, Weaver’s ambition is to contribute a voice that fuses arthistorical and pop cultural references into a new language that is emphatically feminine, championing the aesthetics of cuteness, whimsy, and girliness.

王晓曲，《冰人》，布面油画，100 x 120 cm，2018
Wang Xiaoqu, Man with Ice, Oil on canvas, 100 x 120 cm, 2018 (Courtesy of artist and AIKE)

Wang Xiaoqu was born in 1987 in China, she lives and works in Beijing, China. Wang creates environments and narratives that intertwine influences from theatre, comicbooks and common events. The idea behind her works stems from her own experience as a photographer in the past: She registers her perception of reality with the precision and detailed composition of a photographer and successively transforms that reality into the grotesque and surreal world, creating a unique visual experience. The result is an exaggeration of forms, volumes and proportions, and a black-humorous chronicle of daily events, where her characters stand still almost as sculptural elements. Wang is concerned aboutthe fragility of subjective truth and the inherent inauthenticity of painting, and therefore, resisting any attempt to dig for deeper meaning. She keeps searching for an ephemeral connection between the subject of each image and then arrative plot generated by the figures that populate it.