We are delighted to announce the opening of Juicy the fourth solo exhibition by Gao Ludi on August 28th 2018 at WHITE SPACE BEIJING.
The solo exhibition presents the two series Yellow Peach and Human Skull, which elaborate and enrich elements of the artist’s painting based practice. Whilst the two series address the figurative representation of objects, an ‘outcome’ is that they also point to a critical boundary separating ‘life’, ‘death’, and ‘rebirth’. From the outset, the artist gravitates to two formal qualities connected to objects relating to his life experiences. Through a method of searching online keywords, he appropriates from this digital sea and tampers with the anonymous remnants of what are often considered ‘bad images’. Lacking any clear or original aesthetic intentionality, these images are memorialized as they are resurrected and enhanced to a monumental scale through his paintings.
The fresh, succulent, mass of yellow peaches and human skulls, together mark the conclusion of a living being’s growth, ripening, and eventual decline (the entropy of a corporeal body). By using the body to create, the artist also brings into play a new material and conceptual outcome into the work. The vivid forms, bright colors and lucid brushstrokes display a vitality, dynamism, and material tactility to the yellow peaches and the human skulls, going as far as to take the palette towards a certain death mode – within the paintings, these elements together collide to create a form of ‘savage poetry’. In a sense, with the yellow peaches, human skulls, online images, and the artist’s paintings, they represent stages prior to the formation of behavior, movement, and are outcomes that emerge out of the process of living – they together embody formative ‘seminal’ moments that lead us towards certain uncharted territories as we oscillate back and forth within the cycle of life and death.
Gao Ludi (b. 1990, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China) received his BFA in Oil Painting at the Institute for Fine Arts at Capital Normal University (Beijing) in 2013. Recent exhibitions include Juicy, WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China (2018); A World in a Grain of Sand: Mapping Shapes and Sites for Social Deometries, Atlantis Sanya, Sanya, China (2018); Album, Ibid Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2018), Gao Ludi: Painting Blind, or, a History of Abyssal Movements, Wyoming Project, Beijing, China (2017); Our Painting, Yang Art Museum, Beijing, China (2016); Gao Ludi, WHITE SPACE BEIJING, Beijing, China (2016); Trio, Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts (AMNUA), Nanjing, China (2015). Gao Ludi currently lives and works in Beijing, China.