Opening: Saturday, 23 April 2016, 16:00-18:00

Curator: WANG Xinyou

Artists: Benjamin APPEL / Enrico BACH / HUANG Jia / HUANG Yuanqing / KANG Haitao / LIANG Quan / LIU Jian / MENG Qingxin / Alexandra ROUSSOPOULOS / TAN Ping / WANG Chuan / WANG Jian / WANG Jieyin / WANG Shilong

PIFO Gallery is pleased to present Poétique: The 9th Annual Exhibition of Abstract Art. The investigation and on-going consideration of abstraction has become a signature part of the PIFO calendar over the last decade.

Contrary to Greenberg’s proposition that abstraction in Western modern painting would end in formalism, the most enduring, and engaging abstract art is not merely a visual game.

In the first decade of the 1900s, mystical, pan-religious spiritual experiences inspired Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich and gave rise to the birth of abstraction. Their passions, along with the deep seated sense of humanity and commitment to society embodied by Matisse, Picasso, Munch and Magritte amongst others, made up two sides of an anti-rationalist movement that took hold in the early twentieth century. During the 1940s, avant-garde artists such as Rothko, Pollock and Motherwell – who blatantly expressed their egos, emotions and experiences through their abstract visual elements such as drips, colour-blocks and stripes – stepped out from the shadow of their ‘Picasso-generation’ masters, and began what is now referred to as the American style of abstract expressionism.

The renaissance in abstract art in recent years has coincided with the resurgence of the arts poétique – a paradigm that supports the sublime ideals of simplicity, harmony and beauty. While these notions may seem recessive, even passive, they can nevertheless deliver a powerful counter-statement in response to the seemingly ubiquitous binary oppositions of individual and system and the avant-garde and the mainstream. Disassociated from such habitual critical perspectives, as well as those nominal progressive concepts within the context of society, contemporary abstraction offers a fresh presence brimming with life and passion.

This exhibition brings together fourteen Chinese and international artists all using an aesthetic artistic language of line, shape, colour and composition to reflect on a long lost poetic state of mind.