CHANG ART GALLERY in Beijing is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition by British painter Paul Huxley, June 26 to July 26. 20 paintings representing the past 10 years will be featured. This exhibition follows Huxley’s successful show at Chang Art’s sister gallery in Seoul, Watergate.
Venue: CHANG ART (798 Art District, 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing)
Time: 26 June - 26 July 2009
Tel: +86 10 59789898 / 59789899
www.changart.com
Born in London in 1938, Huxley studied at Harrow School of Art from 1953 to 1956 when, at the age of seventeen, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools where he graduated in 1960. His first solo exhibition was at the Rowan Gallery, London in 1963. In 1964 he was selected by Bryan Robertson for ‘The New Generation’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which introduced young group of influential artists to a wider public. This exhibition included Huxley’s ‘Fluid’ series, for which he was awarded First Prize. The award allowed him to travel to New York, where he became friends with many of the leading American artists.
The following year Huxley received a Harkness Fellowship that funded a two year residency in New York culminating in his first solo show there. During this time he made the initial studies for his ‘Key series’, works in which he deconstructed the traditional monocentric format of abstract painting. These were seminal to the development of the divided canvases that have characterized his work ever since.
Over the past 45 years Huxley has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in major museums and galleries around the world. Using modernism as a starting point, Huxley has sought to explore new tensions within a painting’s surface and to break with traditional preconceptions of balance and harmony.
Huxely was professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art from 1986 to 1998. Many of his students from these years such as Dinos Chapman, Nigel Cook, Dexter Dalwood, Andrew Grassie, Tracey Emin, Chantal Joffe and Chris Ofili are now internationally-recognised artists, themselves.
Huxley has also been a member of the advisory panels for the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Serpentine Gallery, a trustee of the Tate Gallery and served as chairman of its Exhibitions Committee. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1987 and has been its Treasurer since 2000.
Paul Huxley remains an important and influential artist and teacher, dedicated to the challenges that abstract painting presents to today’s painters. Chang Art is grateful to present Paul Huxley’s retrospective works in Beijing, the new mecca of contemporary art.
Works
1998 Anima, Animus
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Anima Animus I 1998 195×195 cm |
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Many symbols exist in Paul Huxley’s world. The use of Latin words to title his paintings is a reaction to the ambiguity many artists suggest by listing works as ‘Untitled.’ This series was created in 1998 with an impressive name “Anima (feminine aspects of men)” and “Animus (masculine aspects of women)”. The canvas was divided in two; Anima that signified soul, spirit, life etc. is in the left, to present an ambiguous tracing pattern, while the Animus which signified rationality will and definition etc. is in the right, to express a clear permutation and combination among quadrangles.
1999 Mutatis Mutandis
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Mutatis Mutandis XII 2008 137×137 cm |
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Mutatis Mutandis means finished essential changes in Latin. He divided the canvas into two identical parts, in consideration of stressing logical moves and indefinite features. In the tensions caused by the composition of the work, the spiral figure in the left is making a dialogue with the geometrical pattern in the right in constant motion. The patterns in both sides are running into completely opposite directions, drawing viewers’ attentions from one side to another.
2001 Proteus
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Proteus V 2009 172×172 cm |
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Proteus is sea-god in Greek mythology, which has a capricious personality and masters dazzling shape change. Huxley worked out the infallible combination on a pile of sketches practicing. In his works, the left part shows the eurhythmic curves (it displays the appearance of the image rather than reveals the artist’s internal irrational inspiration). The color plane is laid in the right of the canvas and indicates a type of balance, which constitutes a disproportionate combination with the moving, curving parallel in the left, to strengthen the painting space.
2008 China
In 2004 Huxley was invited to visit China by The Red Mansion Foundation and stayed in the country for several weeks visiting Beijing, Kunming and Shanghai. That was Huxley’s first visit to China and as he absorbed the richness of a new visual culture his attention was caught by large red symbols painted directly on to walls by the sidewalk. He did not know the meaning of these symbols and, in fact did not need to, because what Huxley was struck by was the abstract form of each. These were not calligraphic images but signage and their large, bold, emblematic presence caused Huxley to reflect upon the appropriateness of language and the manner in which our perception of visual stimuli is conditioned by our own history and cultural context. Relocated in a new and unfamiliar culture, Huxley brought his years of fascination with the possibility inherent in abstract painting into symbiosis with Chinese street slogans.
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