.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
From the earliest stages of his career, Zeng Fanzhi's paintings have been marked by their emotional directness, the artist's intuitive psychological sense, and his carefully calibrated expressionistic technique. His Mask series remain as his best recognized, but his meticulous and expressive fusion of form and content can be found throughout his oeuvre. With the end of the Mask series, Zeng began to pursue more unmediated forms of painterly expression. Zeng has said, "I was interested in expressing the attitudes of moods of people, an individual person, and to do so in a direct response, aimed at conveying the person's expression, emotion, thinking and my own sense of that person." Zeng's current paintings witness the artist returning to a fully elaborated canvas. These works display less investment in metaphor and symbol and instead, Zeng relies on the "automatic" flow in his brush to reveal his own feelings on his particular subject.
Throughout his career, Zeng has returned to the image of Andy Warhol and in Untitled (Lot 128) the artist eliminates any contextualizing environment and focuses instead on a more direct character study. Painted in 2005, Zeng takes one of Warhol's most iconic self-portraits and makes it his own filled with wild and excited brushstrokes. Against a grayish, blue utopian sky, the portrait of Warhol is viewed behind the intermingling of abstracted pure color lines. It is Warhol's own self-image that is the perfect corollary to Zeng's Mask series and his career in general. Where Zeng has sought to find thematic and technical expression for the suppressed angst and insecurity inherent to modern life, Warhol radically asserted that the surface of things - from celebrity to common consumer objects - was all we should desire for. It is as if, at last, Zeng cannot penetrate the surface of things; in some ways, Zeng's portrait of Warhol is the adverse to his Mask paintings; rather than giving us his quick and almost ruthless rendering of character, he suggests instead the ways in which despite our best efforts, certain aspects of other people's character will always remain mysterious. In Zeng's hands, Untitled is a further extension of the artist's interest in subjectivity, and a metaphorical projection of an inner state.
Throughout his career, Zeng has returned to the image of Andy Warhol and in Untitled (Lot 128) the artist eliminates any contextualizing environment and focuses instead on a more direct character study. Painted in 2005, Zeng takes one of Warhol's most iconic self-portraits and makes it his own filled with wild and excited brushstrokes. Against a grayish, blue utopian sky, the portrait of Warhol is viewed behind the intermingling of abstracted pure color lines. It is Warhol's own self-image that is the perfect corollary to Zeng's Mask series and his career in general. Where Zeng has sought to find thematic and technical expression for the suppressed angst and insecurity inherent to modern life, Warhol radically asserted that the surface of things - from celebrity to common consumer objects - was all we should desire for. It is as if, at last, Zeng cannot penetrate the surface of things; in some ways, Zeng's portrait of Warhol is the adverse to his Mask paintings; rather than giving us his quick and almost ruthless rendering of character, he suggests instead the ways in which despite our best efforts, certain aspects of other people's character will always remain mysterious. In Zeng's hands, Untitled is a further extension of the artist's interest in subjectivity, and a metaphorical projection of an inner state.