ART

Zhang Wei
Holzwarth Publications 2017 ISBN 9783935567923 Acqn 27467
Hb 31x31cm 60pp 53ills 49col 38

Zhang Wei (born 1952) is internationally regarded as one of the most important Chinese painters.
Already in the 1970s he started the quest for an independent artistic identity within the legendary
No Name Group. The present book showcases a series of new abstract paintings exhibited at
Galerie Max Hetzler in 2016: large canvases, bright colours applied with a great lightness of
touch, almost like watercolours. Zhang builds his compositions in an additive process which
allows no painting over, but only the present as an expression of a specific situation: It is about
the choice of colours, the artist explains. To me colour is just myself.

Along with these current abstractions we find a group of very early paintings on paper made from
1974 to 1977. Moving outside the art education offered by the state, Zhang painted parks and
buildings in plain air. Two essays follow the artists further development: working as a set
designer at the traditional Kunqu opera, and finding his own way in abstraction through influences
from ink wash painting and calligraphy. In the mid-1980s Zhang moved to New York for 20 years
and on his return combined both worlds, countering the process-oriented approach of abstract
expressionism with the Chinese stance expressed in the saying: Power is formless. Between
both, the new paintings of Zhang Wei show the work of a man who in life as in art places freedom
above everything.

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 ART

Liz Larner
Holzwarth Publications 2017 ISBN 9783935567916 Acqn 27468
Hb 28x29cm 54pp 52ills 51col 38

The ceramic work of American artist Liz Larner (born 1960) offers many different layers: their
form and heaviness are reminiscent of antique plates, in the deep hues of the glazings they are
like paintings, while their fissured and often broken surfaces tell the story of their creation. This
theme of brokenness can also be found in the titles: caesura suggests a pause between two
halves, subduction refers to the collision of tectonic plates, calefaction is a heat experiment in
which minerals added to the clay crystallize or evaporate, porcelain melt means putting stress on
what has already been created. Above the cracks, though, Larner adds the mesmerizing surfaces
of her exactly shaded glazings.

The book presents these works as shown at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin 2016. Two different
storylines meet here: Larners own artistic development, where her conceptual interest led her to
work with ceramics around the turn of the millennium, and the role the material has played in the
history of modernism through artists such as Picasso, Fontana, Asger Jorn, and Peter Voulkos.
As with Fontanas and Jorns best works, Peter Pakesch writes in his essay, ceramic in
Larners hands becomes a special combination of painting and sculpture, embodying the qualities
of both worlds. Approaching ceramics from a background of conceptual analysis, she has always
made the case for a deep study of the material and its special characteristics. She may now have
arrived at the point at whichbeyond the contradictions that always held a special significance in
her workshe has achieved a naturalness that allows her a virtuosic play of form, material, and
colour. With what other material could this have been possible?

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 ART

Albert Oehlen - Works on Paper

Holzwarth Publications 2017 ISBN 9783935567909 Acqn 27469
Pb 22x28cm 38pp 32ills 16.95

The book presents works on paper that Albert Oehlen showed at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin
2016 along with a huge drawing made on a wall of the exhibition space. These are drawings that
put the medium to the test: what is the meaning of a line, how do we recognize an artists
personal thumbprint, where does drawing end and painting start?

In Oehlens sheet-sized ink drawings from 2014 the line circumscribes open forms in unruly little
curls, suggesting figurative motifs and dissolving them in the next moment. These sheets
confound our expectations that the artists stroke should describe or express something, which
makes them all the more allusive. Oehlens large-format charcoal drawings from 2016, on the
other hand, are abstractions the size of paintings, whose gestures use the full reach of the body.
They are dance-like in their precarious balance of forms and highly resistant in the unpredictable
behaviour of the lines. The artists large wall drawing follows the same manner, but at three and a
half against ten meters it explodes all reference to the human body. It subverts the idea of
gestural drawing as a form of immediate expression, since its apparent spontaneity must be
following an exact plan.

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