Zeng Fanzhi

For his first New York City exhibition in over a decade, Zeng Fanzhi will present a new sculpture and a suite of resplendent new paintings that conjure imagined celestial landscapes and topographies. The works advance the celebrated Beijing-based artist's ongoing investigation of color, perception and the material possibilities of paint. The exhibition introduces the latest chapter in Zeng's practice, following on from his critically admired presentation 'Zeng Fanzhi: Near and Far/Now and Then' on view during the 2024 Venice Biennale, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Informed by many years of research into color theory and the paint-layering techniques pioneered by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Zeng's latest paintings employ the principle of 'mélange optique,' or 'optical mixing,' in which hues are layered and placed alongside one another alla prima on the canvas rather than blended on the palette. Seen from a distance, these coalesce into images of landscapes and geological formations; observed up close, that legibility dissolves into mesmerizingly complex fields of pure pigment.

The new sculpture on view extends these ideas and techniques into three dimensions: a blue onyx obelisk-like object suggests both abstract form and an artifact from another as-yet untraversed place. Although constructed from naturally occurring gemstone, this blue and cream banded quartz stabile strikes the viewer as something excavated from the imagined planets depicted in Zeng's paintings.