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9/1/2013

Wang Xieda - Sol LeWitt

James Cohan Gallery, New York

Wang Xieda
Subject Verb Object

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present Subject Verb Object, a solo exhibition by Shanghai-based artist Wang Xieda, opening on January 10th and running through February 9th, 2013. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

On view are sculptures by Wang Xieda in both cast bronze and paper pulp. Xieda has spent the past 20 years studying the history of Chinese written language, specifically focusing on Chinese calligraphy of the fourth century, a period in which the brush came to be used for writing as an alternative to carving characters into wood, bamboo, or stone. Chinese writing evolved through the development of pictographs (which depicted objects) or ideographs (which represented abstract notions) and the bronze sculptures from the artist’s series Sages’ Sayings derive from these ancient forms.

In the main gallery, the bronze works are installed on long pedestals where they resonate in visual phrases—the “sayings” suggested by the title of the series. Chinese grammar, similar to English, employs a subject, a verb, and an object in the construction of sentences. However in Chinese, other parts of speech, such as measure words and suffix syllables like “ma” or “le,” exist to connote suggestion or questions. It is through calligraphy that the ancient Chinese visually expressed the many intricacies of the written word. In finding a contemporary approach, Xieda has brought calligraphy into three-dimensional space, continuing the impulse, intact from ancient times, to expand upon the expressive capability of language. Minimal and elegant, there is a formal kinship with the Modernist geometry of David Smith and the texture, negative space and shadow play of Alberto Giacometti. Conceptually, however, the sculptures speak to the artist’s pursuit to reveal the common human experience as communicated through the origins of language.

Additionally on display are recent unique works made from rattan and paper pulp. These works delve into formal investigations of how sculpture can become an extension of space. Suspended in mid air, these sculptures rely on the intangible elements of light and shadow to complete them, thereby addressing what might be considered a fourth dimension of seeing. The contrast of positive and negative, dark and light, inside and outside, and reality and illusion are all at play in these works.

Wang Xieda was born in Fushun, Liaoning Province in 1968, and graduated from the Sculpture Department, China Academy of Art in 1996. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions internationally, such as Arte Chino, Wang Xieda, Cuba Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba (2010); Wang Xieda, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Spain (2010); Sages' Sayings: Wang Xieda’s Art at Z-Art Center in Shanghai (2009), and at the Shanghai Sculpture Space (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Ushuaia, Argentina, 2011; The Inaugural Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Poetry，OCT Art and Design Gallery, Shenzhen, 2011; Tao of Nature—Chinese Abstract Art Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, 2011. During the past 10 years, Xieda’s work has been included in international group exhibitions and art fairs, such as SH Contemporary, Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai (2011); Korea-China Contemporary Art Exchange, Zaha Museum, Seoul, Korea (2010); ARTOUR-O the MUST, Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia, Museo Archeologico, Museo di Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy (2010). He lives and works in Shanghai.

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Sol LeWitt
Cut Torn Folded Ripped

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to announce Cut Torn Folded Ripped, an exhibition of rare early works on paper by Sol LeWitt. Spanning 1967 to 1979, the exhibition has been selected from what are known as "$100 Drawings," a body of work that encompasses more than 800 pieces of manipulated paper, photographs, maps and newspapers. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with Jason Rulnick.

The drawings presented in Cut Torn Folded Ripped are some of the artist’s least known, and are notable for embodying LeWitt's performative "instructions." In 1967 Artforum published LeWitt's Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, in which he stated, “in conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

A significant work in the exhibition, Untitled (Eakins Stamps) (1967), is a sheet of US postage stamps featuring Thomas Eakins’ painting, The Biglin Brothers Racing (1872), from which a grid-like pattern emerges. From this point forward, grids became an element that informed LeWitt's work throughout his career. In A Square of Chicago Without a Circle and Triangle (1979), two shapes have been excised, illustrating LeWitt's early interest in the power of basic geometric motifs as well as ideas related to dislocation and site.

The notion of dislocation similarly finds voice in Page With An Area Removed R208 November 18, 1974 (1974), for which the artist engineered an exercise in futility. With a large square cut out of the center of the paper, text written on the bottom of the drawing states "a page with an area between a point halfway between the center of the page & the upper left corner, the center of the page and the lower left corner, the center of the page and the lower right corner, and the center of the page and the upper right corner removed.” Untitled suspends the viewer’s mind and eye in space. LeWitt’s directives here reveal subliminal wit, with no obvious location to be ‘seen.’

Sol LeWitt played a major role in the minimalist and conceptual art movement of the 1960s. These seminal early works embody the conceptual framework that formed the crux of all of the artist's art-making endeavors. LeWitt reframed traditional notions of drawing, sculpture and photography by establishing a personal artistic vocabulary of ‘impersonal’ and seemingly simple instructions, providing a platform for language and image to merge and radically changing the landscape of contemporary art.

Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide since 1965. After receiving a B.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1949, he moved to New York City in the 1950s and pursued his interest in design. His prolific two and three-dimensional work ranges from Wall Drawings, over 1100 of which have been executed, to photographs and hundreds of works on paper and extends to structures in the form of towers, pyramids, geometric forms, and progressions. In recent years the artist has been the subject of exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Center, Long Island City; The Addison Gallery of American Art Phillips Academy, Andover; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; San Francisco Museum of Art, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A retrospective of the artist’s wall drawings is currently on view at MASS MOCA.

Opening Reception and Artist Talk Thursday, January 10, 6-8PM
Wang Xieda in Conversation wtih Dr. Agnes Hsu 6:15-7PM

James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street - New York
Admission free

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