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Lot Essay
Richard Lin spent a lifetime developing the concept of "Painting Relief", breaking down barriers between painting, sculpture, and construction, and has created a style of painting unique in the history of art.
This lot was created in 1963, and is a classic piece among Richard Lin's early series of painting reliefs. He layers varied shades of white oil paint as a base, building up to a precise thickness and form, and compresses aluminium and acrylic glass into a flattened surface, which he then combines with oil paint to form his image. The abstract geometric elements that result occupy dimensional space and mass, creating a multidimensional spatial order on canvas that depends on its distance from the viewer, and every layer of that space is real and tangible.
Russian artist El Lissitzky's "Proun Room" series of work likewise turns the flat shapes of Suprematism into three-dimensional cubes and lines (Fig. 1), for the geometric shapes that take up volume on the image look as though they are floating within a liminal space. Yet while Richard Lin borrows from the methods and concepts of sculpting, painting is his original purpose. His relief works break free from linear perspective, which has been the basis of painting and the visual experience since the Western Renaissance, and by turning painting into matter (relief), he creates a visual experience for the viewer by allowing the transformation of light and shadow to take place upon the image. He absorbs the concepts of sculpting and infuses it with the methods of painting, opening up an alternative space of painting to create an entirely new abstract art that sets itself apart from linear perspective.
The colour white is yet another distinctive feature within Richard Lin's art. He states, "The colour white inherently contains variations of colour, such as thick, thin, light, heavy, transparent, translucent…… they create shapes and spaces in between white and white that are filled with mystery". It is apparent that white isn't just a colour to Richard Lin, but a sequence of colours. Colour is an evershifting spectrum of light, and the human eye can identify far more colours than language can name; and Richard Lin has broadened the spectrum of white in his paintings. In 20th century Western art history, the colour white symbolized simplicity and purity, and more importantly infinity and eternity, which is in line with the spirit of contemporary civilization. In Chinese painting, white symbolizes a blank existence, and becomes an element within the image that cannot be ignored, thus "turning white to black". This piece makes similar use of varied degrees of "blankness" to construct a sense of space, and is also a distinctive feature of Richard Lin's work.
Richard Lin makes use of Western mediums in his craft, successfully combining the Eastern philosophy of "Everything is one" and the Western contemporary artistic concept of "Less is more", and at the same time broadens the methods and meanings of the colour white. This is due to the artist's precise grasp of moderation, sharp artistic intuition, and the meticulous crafting of image, which turns white into a vessel of both Eastern culture and the Western contemporary spirit.
This lot was created in 1963, and is a classic piece among Richard Lin's early series of painting reliefs. He layers varied shades of white oil paint as a base, building up to a precise thickness and form, and compresses aluminium and acrylic glass into a flattened surface, which he then combines with oil paint to form his image. The abstract geometric elements that result occupy dimensional space and mass, creating a multidimensional spatial order on canvas that depends on its distance from the viewer, and every layer of that space is real and tangible.
Russian artist El Lissitzky's "Proun Room" series of work likewise turns the flat shapes of Suprematism into three-dimensional cubes and lines (Fig. 1), for the geometric shapes that take up volume on the image look as though they are floating within a liminal space. Yet while Richard Lin borrows from the methods and concepts of sculpting, painting is his original purpose. His relief works break free from linear perspective, which has been the basis of painting and the visual experience since the Western Renaissance, and by turning painting into matter (relief), he creates a visual experience for the viewer by allowing the transformation of light and shadow to take place upon the image. He absorbs the concepts of sculpting and infuses it with the methods of painting, opening up an alternative space of painting to create an entirely new abstract art that sets itself apart from linear perspective.
The colour white is yet another distinctive feature within Richard Lin's art. He states, "The colour white inherently contains variations of colour, such as thick, thin, light, heavy, transparent, translucent…… they create shapes and spaces in between white and white that are filled with mystery". It is apparent that white isn't just a colour to Richard Lin, but a sequence of colours. Colour is an evershifting spectrum of light, and the human eye can identify far more colours than language can name; and Richard Lin has broadened the spectrum of white in his paintings. In 20th century Western art history, the colour white symbolized simplicity and purity, and more importantly infinity and eternity, which is in line with the spirit of contemporary civilization. In Chinese painting, white symbolizes a blank existence, and becomes an element within the image that cannot be ignored, thus "turning white to black". This piece makes similar use of varied degrees of "blankness" to construct a sense of space, and is also a distinctive feature of Richard Lin's work.
Richard Lin makes use of Western mediums in his craft, successfully combining the Eastern philosophy of "Everything is one" and the Western contemporary artistic concept of "Less is more", and at the same time broadens the methods and meanings of the colour white. This is due to the artist's precise grasp of moderation, sharp artistic intuition, and the meticulous crafting of image, which turns white into a vessel of both Eastern culture and the Western contemporary spirit.