Yan Pei-Ming, Help @ galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

29 octobre 2013

Yan Pei-Ming, Help @ galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Yan Pei-Ming, Char, 2013. Oil on canvas. 280 x 400 cm. Courtesy galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris), © Yan Pei-Ming

PARIS - L'exposition de Yan Pei-Ming s'étendra sur les trois étages de la galerie et sera composée de peintures et d'une série d'aquarelles créées pour l'occasion.

L'exposition intitulée «Help!» sera construite comme s'il s'agissait de dérouler le scénario d'un film dans les différents espaces, tout en conservant le style caractéristique de l'artiste: le genre historique.

Yan Pei-Ming convoque l'histoire récente à travers l'observation d'images médiatiques. Leur transcription à l'échelle monumentale par le médium de la peinture à l'huile confère à l'actualité une dimension historique qui n'est pas sans rappeler le scandale de la réception du Radeau de la Méduse de Géricault. Le spectateur est confronté à l'immédiateté d'images au fort potentiel historique, mais l'absence de recul temporel crée l'interrogation, le doute et l'émotion.

L'exposition «Help!» abordera des thématiques propres au genre de la «peinture d'Histoire» ainsi que des thèmes empruntés aux faits marquants de l'actualité comme la Guerre en Libye ou des scènes de combats terrestres et aériens.

Un catalogue contenant des textes inédits de Henri Loyrette et de Robert Fleck sera édité à l'occasion de l'exposition.

Diplômé de l'Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, Yan Pei-Ming vit et travaille entre Dijon et Ivry-sur-Seine.

Yan Pei-Ming, Autoportrait à un dollar F56789603 H, 2009. Watercolour on paper. 153.5 x 247.5 cm. Courtesy galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris), © Yan Pei-Ming

PARIS - Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce its first exhibition by Chinese-born French artist Yan Pei-Ming. It is several years now since his work was last presented in a French gallery. The exhibition Help! will be built around several of the artist’s characteristic genres. Portraits, history painting and vanities will be presented on the three floors of our gallery in the Marais.

In the main gallery space, the secular themes of war and peace will come face to face in both a dialectical and a painterly confrontation. On the gallery’s other two floors, there are works on paper, and an iconic figure is the subject of oil portraits.

Yan Pei-Ming summons up immediate history through careful observation of media images. His transformation of these images into huge-scale oil paintings gives a historical dimension to current affairs that is reminiscent of the scandal that greeted Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. The beholder is confronted by the immediacy of an image of historical potential. But the absence of distance gives rise to doubt, to questions and emotion. The exhibition Help! will take on themes peculiar to 'history painting' as well as themes taken from significant current events like the war in Libya or scenes of land and air combat.

“I am reminded once again of Manet and Goya as I stand in front of these works by Yan Pei-Ming – of them more than any other artist because of their constant evocation of the disasters of war, the use of black and white, their devotion to painting. (…) After Marat, lying murdered on the white linen of his bathtub, the procession of the executed and the assassinated stretches forth: Saddam Hussein, Lee Harvey Oswald, John and Robert Kennedy, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Aldo Moro, Martin Luther King, the good and the evil, all on their way, with holes in their bodies, naked, all labelled for the morgue. Always the same story, Yan Pei-Ming tells us. But the story needs its teller, someone with the stature to draw it all together, to pin it down and denounce it, using the tried and tested weapon of paint.” (Henri Loyrette, foreword of the exhibition catalogue)

A catalogue containing new essays by Henri Loyrette and Robert Fleck will be published to accompany the exhibition.