Opening reception: ‘Zhang Enli. New Paintings’

We are delighted to invite you to the opening reception of ‘Zhang Enli. New Paintings’, on view from 17 January – 29 February 2020. The presentation will showcase a series of paintings that reflect on the artist’s progression to looser and freer brushwork, expressing his own emotive intuition. While these pieces are explorations of Zhang Enli’s work in abstraction, many are anchored in figuration with descriptive titles.

Zhang Enli emerged onto the art scene in the 1990s when he was most associated with symbolic, figurative paintings. Following this, he embarked on a series of quotidian objects treated sensitively and beautifully – whether containers, wires or hoses – these were imbued with their own personal stories, expressive of people in the associated utilities and desires they represented. From here the artist’s gaze turned to the outside world, urban dwellings and nature, blurring the boundaries between inside and out, as he painted trees and skies in varied colours, playing with weight, transparency and texture.