PIFO Gallery is delighted to present Zhang Jian’s solo exhibition Tranquility. It has been ten years since his last solo exhibition in China.
This exhibition presents work from the Daily Scenery series created since 2014. Working with a clearly very different set of techniques, these paintings by Zhang Jian are much more abstract and expressionistic than his previous work. Anxious, multi-layered brush strokes and complex colours communicate a feeling more than they attempt to reflect the reality of a scene giving each work a restless energy. While rural and urban scenes still form the main subject for his work, how the artist deals with each painting is remarkably different – from the naive style of simple figuration to the use of a fauvist palette and further to rapid mark-making that could be associated with the action painting of the American Abstract Expressionists – all brought together to capture a unique moment in contemporary Chinese culture.
ZHANG Jian
Zhang Jian was born in 1968 in Beijing and graduated from China Central Academy of Fine Art in 1993. He lives and works in Beijing. He has had solo shows in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Korea, Thailand and Germany and has participated in international group shows held in the Asian Art Museum, Louise Blouin Foundation and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum amongst others. His works can be found in the collections of the Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; the Guangdong Museum of Art; the Shanghai Art Museum and the Long Museum.
