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Lot Essay
Of all the artists working in the unofficial interstices of this period, Gu Dexin has had perhaps the most extraordinarily varied output, one that suggests his radical turn towards conceptual and installation art in the 1990s and beyond. Best known for his poetic installations of rotting organic materials including, at different times, raw meat or slowly rotting apples (Fig. 1), Gu's output in the early 1980s displays his restless appetite for new styles, techniques and expressive forms. As an untrained outsider, Gu has never been constrained by the dictates of convention, and he has succeeded in upping the ante in the conceptual rigor and depth of his works at every stage.
In the earliest canvases featured here, Gu moves quickly through a range of techniques and subjects. One canvas from 1979, B36 (Lot 239), shows the artist working in an expressionistic manner, producing a landscape with thick, blunt and dry brushstrokes. Reminiscent of but more coarse than the works of Vincent van Gogh (Fig. 2), the earth, river, sky and clouds, are hewn together by a steady, pulsing, wave-like rhythm. In another canvas produced just a year later, B32 (Lot 242), Gu offers an impressionistic, grungy industrial space. Composed of sketchy earth tones, offset and enlivened by whites, cool greys and blues, the composition hovers between that of a placid crowd scene or the carcasses found in a slaughterhouse. B37 (Lot 243), painted in the same period delves deeper into ambiguity and darkness, with a claustrophobic, prison-like space, the viewer is drawn vertiginously in to the nightmarish space by a long shaft of unnatural light.
In 1989, Gu, along with Huang Yong Ping and Yang Jiechang (fig. 3), was invited to participate in the groundbreaking "Les Magiciens de la terre" exhibit at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and henceforth would become an essential figure in international museum exhibitions. The early 1980s continued to be an extremely productive time for Gu, and the range of styles and concepts found in the paintings featured here, suggest the spark of creativity that drew curators to his studio. These works span the range of central artistic themes of the modern age - sex, death, and art-making itself. B09 (Lot 237) from 1982 is a powerfully and unnerving canvas featuring a skeletal male cowering in a fetal position. He appears in in an ambiguous space, a vortex that is both womb- and cave-like, lit mysteriously and conjured in alternating hatch-work brushstrokes. The tormented soul of the artist is further foregrounded in subsequent canvases from the following year, B0 (Lot 241) and B28 (Lot 236), both dominated by a symbolic, disembodied hand. The uncertainty of contemporary life in the1980s pervaded much of the raw experimentalism of the period, and that mournful and anxiety, coupled with a desire for a utopic escape, can be found throughout Gu's works. In B0 we see the flayed flesh of a hand streaming into liquid drips along the surface of the canvas, rendered in a style that mixes a hyper-realist rendering of the flesh and its sinews with a layering of expressionistic paint, suggesting a shattered space of chaos and struggle. In B28, the striving hand returns as the dominant motif of a surrealistic composition. Standing monumentally against a gently cloudy sky, the image takes on totemic proportions, plagued by an insidious swarm of insects. Gu's works however were not all sturm und drang. In A04 (Lot 238), also from 1983, we see the artist exploring the classic genre of the artist's studio. Painted in muted, post-impressionistic blues and browns, Gu offers an unexpectedly charming vision of the humble artist's studio, the sinewy forms of the propped canvas painting echoed in the silhouette of the tree outside the window. In this warm, dusty space, the artist is committed to his solitary pursuits, with a softly melancholic afternoon light waning beyond. Later, as a member of the New Measurement Group, Gu would adhere to an aesthetic policy that sought to erase the individual expression of the artist, a radical position meant to offset the institutionalization and valorization of the artist as auteur. We can already see this impulse in these early canvases with their deliberately impersonal titles. Even so, we can find unexpected strains of poetic sentimentality and even whimsy in Gu's works, as with the spectacularly pan-sexual fantasias of D08 (Lot 240) as well as in his works on paper A30 (Lot 245) and A26 (Lot 244). In these works, Gu offers visions of a subterranean world populated by animal-human-insect hermaphroditic creatures, exuberantly co-mingling. Dense with activity, the compositions are as anxious as they are ecstatic. Throughout these works, we see Gu Delving into different corners of the themes that would inform his works for years to come: an interest in power, ephemerality and deterioration, violence and terror, as well as the restless search for materials and motifs that would transcend merely intellectual bodies and inspire a full visceral, aesthetic response in the viewer. Even as Gu would eventually move away from paint as his primary media, we see in these works his virtuosity and easy facility with the material, producing works that suggest the emergence of his worldview as an artist. Gu quickly moved through themes, concepts and images that would drive the Chinese avant-garde for decades to come, as with the mournful elegies of the human spirit in Zhang Xiaogang (Lot 37), the images of dissolution and decay in the paintings of Liu Wei (Lot 40), or the fatalistic existential drift of Fang Lijun (Fig. 4).
In the earliest canvases featured here, Gu moves quickly through a range of techniques and subjects. One canvas from 1979, B36 (Lot 239), shows the artist working in an expressionistic manner, producing a landscape with thick, blunt and dry brushstrokes. Reminiscent of but more coarse than the works of Vincent van Gogh (Fig. 2), the earth, river, sky and clouds, are hewn together by a steady, pulsing, wave-like rhythm. In another canvas produced just a year later, B32 (Lot 242), Gu offers an impressionistic, grungy industrial space. Composed of sketchy earth tones, offset and enlivened by whites, cool greys and blues, the composition hovers between that of a placid crowd scene or the carcasses found in a slaughterhouse. B37 (Lot 243), painted in the same period delves deeper into ambiguity and darkness, with a claustrophobic, prison-like space, the viewer is drawn vertiginously in to the nightmarish space by a long shaft of unnatural light.
In 1989, Gu, along with Huang Yong Ping and Yang Jiechang (fig. 3), was invited to participate in the groundbreaking "Les Magiciens de la terre" exhibit at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and henceforth would become an essential figure in international museum exhibitions. The early 1980s continued to be an extremely productive time for Gu, and the range of styles and concepts found in the paintings featured here, suggest the spark of creativity that drew curators to his studio. These works span the range of central artistic themes of the modern age - sex, death, and art-making itself. B09 (Lot 237) from 1982 is a powerfully and unnerving canvas featuring a skeletal male cowering in a fetal position. He appears in in an ambiguous space, a vortex that is both womb- and cave-like, lit mysteriously and conjured in alternating hatch-work brushstrokes. The tormented soul of the artist is further foregrounded in subsequent canvases from the following year, B0 (Lot 241) and B28 (Lot 236), both dominated by a symbolic, disembodied hand. The uncertainty of contemporary life in the1980s pervaded much of the raw experimentalism of the period, and that mournful and anxiety, coupled with a desire for a utopic escape, can be found throughout Gu's works. In B0 we see the flayed flesh of a hand streaming into liquid drips along the surface of the canvas, rendered in a style that mixes a hyper-realist rendering of the flesh and its sinews with a layering of expressionistic paint, suggesting a shattered space of chaos and struggle. In B28, the striving hand returns as the dominant motif of a surrealistic composition. Standing monumentally against a gently cloudy sky, the image takes on totemic proportions, plagued by an insidious swarm of insects. Gu's works however were not all sturm und drang. In A04 (Lot 238), also from 1983, we see the artist exploring the classic genre of the artist's studio. Painted in muted, post-impressionistic blues and browns, Gu offers an unexpectedly charming vision of the humble artist's studio, the sinewy forms of the propped canvas painting echoed in the silhouette of the tree outside the window. In this warm, dusty space, the artist is committed to his solitary pursuits, with a softly melancholic afternoon light waning beyond. Later, as a member of the New Measurement Group, Gu would adhere to an aesthetic policy that sought to erase the individual expression of the artist, a radical position meant to offset the institutionalization and valorization of the artist as auteur. We can already see this impulse in these early canvases with their deliberately impersonal titles. Even so, we can find unexpected strains of poetic sentimentality and even whimsy in Gu's works, as with the spectacularly pan-sexual fantasias of D08 (Lot 240) as well as in his works on paper A30 (Lot 245) and A26 (Lot 244). In these works, Gu offers visions of a subterranean world populated by animal-human-insect hermaphroditic creatures, exuberantly co-mingling. Dense with activity, the compositions are as anxious as they are ecstatic. Throughout these works, we see Gu Delving into different corners of the themes that would inform his works for years to come: an interest in power, ephemerality and deterioration, violence and terror, as well as the restless search for materials and motifs that would transcend merely intellectual bodies and inspire a full visceral, aesthetic response in the viewer. Even as Gu would eventually move away from paint as his primary media, we see in these works his virtuosity and easy facility with the material, producing works that suggest the emergence of his worldview as an artist. Gu quickly moved through themes, concepts and images that would drive the Chinese avant-garde for decades to come, as with the mournful elegies of the human spirit in Zhang Xiaogang (Lot 37), the images of dissolution and decay in the paintings of Liu Wei (Lot 40), or the fatalistic existential drift of Fang Lijun (Fig. 4).