Zeng Fanzhi is here at the invitation of businessman and patron of
arts Spas Roussev, who also takes credit for the long list of guests of
the Bulgarian and foreign elite.
The group of foreign guests included top model Elle MacPherson and
fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, Tommy Schiller who took photographs of
Marilyn Monroe, famous photographer Annie Leibovitz and Julia
Peyton-Jones, Director of the influential Serpentine Gallery in London,
UK.
Zeng Fanzhi shows 18 paintings from his collection, including ones
of the Mask Series which brought him world fame in the 1990s.
In 2008, the artist set an auction record for China's modern art
with a painting of the Mask Series that fetched 9.7 million US dollars
at Christie's.
Culture Minister Rashidov conferred Golden Century orders to Zeng
Fanzhi and Hilfiger for their exceptional contribution to global
culture.
Born in Wuhan, Hubei province in 1964, Zeng Fanzhi decided at a very
early age to become a painter. He set the bar for himself extremely
high, endeavoring to become an artist whose work would one day transcend
conventions, borders, fashion and time.
In 1991, Zeng graduated from Hubei Academy of Fine Arts. At that
time, the ideological changes in China and the style of German
Expressionism deeply influenced him. His early paintings are immediately
recognizable by their signature expressionistic strokes, that lend
provocative sensations of underlying violence and agony to his lavishly
rendered canvases.
Upon moving to Beijing, he began his celebrated Mask series in 1994.
In Mask No 13, a man is wearing a white grinning mask and caressing a
Dalmatian with his enormous and chiseled hands. The intimacy between the
man and the dog suggests the artist’s optimistic view towards the world
around him; yet, there is an element of the sinister lurking behind the
mask on the man’s face. By using sharp brush strokes, Zeng magnifies
psychological tensions between the stylized theatrical mask and the
subdued human body.
Anxiety and psychological gravity are also revealed in his
portraits, including a self-portrait from 2009, in which the artist, in a
long red robe, is sitting on a stool in front of a massive solemn
landscape of mountains. He stares intensely out of the painting. His
thoroughly apathetic grimace suggests an attempt to create a work that
is a raw expression of his psychological condition. The subjects of his
portraits are depicted with a set of ridiculously large and bold eyes
looking out of the painting, as if to confront the viewer, capturing
their inner personalities, with the unflinching honesty that
characterizes his work.
Zeng’s landscape paintings mark his departure from his critically
renowned Expressionistic style. Rendering thick woods, sometimes
including people or animals, Zeng brings his landscape to life with a
frenzied network of brush strokes, replicating the inarticulate
calligraphy of muffled sentiment and the galvanization of repressed
anxiety. Painting with two or more brushes simultaneously, Zeng uses one
to describe his subject, while others meander the canvas, leaving
traces of his subconscious through processes. This action of
construction and deconstruction transforms the pictures into near
abstraction.
Since 2009, Zeng has started his meditation with meticulously
painting very simple solitary still lifes: a pair of shoes, a fish or a
piece of lamb, as an effort to reinterpret the history of art in a
contemporary manner. With Trough these seemingly mundane subjects, Zeng
demonstrates his vigorous painting ability and his desire to shift from
expressing daunting human psychics to reconciling his inner self with
nature and his surroundings. The paintings no longer reflect conflicts
and restlessness in the world; instead they are parts of an
introspective odyssey in searching for truth within that goes beyond
rational understanding.
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