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- 40 - 49
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- $1 Million +
The first Italian exhibition dedicated to Mao Xuhui, a central figure of contemporary Chinese avant-garde art. Mao Xuhui: Emergence of the Patriarch, curated by Lü Peng, Li Guohua and Carlotta Scarpa and organized by L-ART GALLERY, brings together 43 works tracing fifty years of the artist’s practice, offering a layered reading of his contribution to the cultural landscape of southwest China.
Born in 1956 in Sichuan, Mao Xuhui is considered one of the key protagonists of the ’85 New Wave and a co-founder of the Southwestern Art Research Group in Kunming. His approach, which he defines as life painting, stems from the social and psychological realities of Southwest China, translating personal and collective tensions into a rigorous and symbolic visual language.The exhibition focuses on the theme of authority, a recurring element in Mao’s production. In the Patriarch series, the father figure becomes an emblem of familial and political power structures, while the motif of scissors — central to his work in the 1980s and ’90s — takes on an ambiguous meaning linked to control, will and vulnerability. Through geometric forms, dark tones and austere compositions, Mao transforms private experience into a universal reflection on cultural memory and social hierarchies.Set within the historic rooms of Palazzo Grimani, the exhibition establishes a direct dialogue between the artist’s research and the museum’s Renaissance heritage. It is part of an ongoing program dedicated to Chinese artists of the generations before and after 1985.The show also marks the Italian launch of the artist’s illustrated biography, published by Skira and edited by Lü Peng, offering new insight into Mao’s ideological and creative trajectory through diaries, letters and archival materials.Spanning half a century of artistic and cultural transformation, Emergence of the Patriarch provides a timely reflection on power, identity and memory, reaffirming Mao Xuhui’s role as one of the defining voices of contemporary Chinese art.
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Mao Xuhui has been living in Kunming with parents since 1956, and graduated from the Yunnan Art Academy in 1982. Mao Xuhui is an iconic artist in Chinese contemporary art history. He is one of the figures in China Art Power 100 and the leader of the avant-garde community in southwest China in the 1980s. Between 1985 and 1989, he brought together a host of young artists mostly from Yunnan and Sichuan under the banner of “New Figurative” to form the Southwest Art Research Group, whose members represented and celebrated in their paintings such intense life awareness typical of the southwestern regions of China that the group came to represent a significant part of the ’85 New Wave, a vanguard movement of contemporary Chinese art. These achievements have earned him a crucial position in Chinese contemporary art history. Mao Xuhui has widely exhibited in Euro-pan-Asian cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, San Francisco, Barcelona, Bologne, Paris, and London. His artworks are included in many influential exhibitions, for example, the milestone exhibition in Chinese contemporary art history, Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998) co-organized by Asia Society New York, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and Hong Kong Museum of Art. His works have been collected by prominent domestic and international galleries and museums, publicized worldwide by news media, and published in art history books and academic journals.
Castello 4858 - 30122 Venezia
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