Olivier Catté, Mahmoud Hamadani, Alan Sonfist, Wang Huangsheng: A Fine Line
December 8, 2016–February 6, 2017
Inaugural opening: December 8, 6–8pm
Art100 New York
555 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
Tuesday–Saturday 11am–6pm
info.art100ny [at] gmail.com
www.art100.hk
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A Fine Line is the inaugural exhibition of Art100 New York, a project of Bai Jia Lake International Group headed by entrepreneur and art collector Yan Lugen. The gallery occupies a 3,000 square foot ground floor space in Chelsea. Bai Jia Lake International Group supports events and institutions that provide opportunities for cultural exchange through visual art. Art100 New York is affiliated with the Group’s galleries in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The gallery presents the work of renowned Chinese and other international contemporary artists, and provides a platform for those who are emerging and distinctive.
Bai Jia Lake projects include the Nanjing International Art Festival, and the Bai Jia Lake Museum. Art100 galleries will open in London and Paris in 2017.
A Fine Line
ART100′s inaugural exhibition features four artists whose distinctive use of simple materials evokes cityscapes, landscapes, and the terrain of the senses. Each is adept at manipulating line and texture to fashion an opening for the viewer to reassess physical reality. They share a level of mastery that permits deep and nuanced expressiveness.
The works of Wang Huangsheng (b. 1956 Guangdong, China) are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Uffizi Gallery, and have been shown at the Broad Art Museum and in many galleries in China, Europe and the U.S. Wang’s vision is rooted in his past. Wang’s father, a painter, was exiled to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. There, Wang learned to paint. His formal training appears in how his lines ebb and flow in varying saturations across the paper. Wang establishes a foothold in tradition but finds self-expression in a fluid yet controlled touch that evokes physical and metaphysical depth with a single extended gesture.
The works of Mahmoud Hamadani (b. 1958 Rasht, Iran) are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum and have been shown at the New Museum and at various New York and London galleries. Hamadani’s personal history also inflects his work. Once a mathematics major, he, creates highly ordered yet exceedingly free form paintings. Many of Hamadani’s paintings resemble nature, but emphasize the role of chance. His ink on paper series uses coincidence, environmental factors, mathematics and traditional Persian and Chinese scripts. He often employs a hands-off process using gravity or by blowing ink on paper.
Olivier Catté (b. 1957 Rouen, France) works with an inherently unpredictable material, recycled cardboard, with which he reflects on urban structure. His work is in the collection of the Picasso Foundation, and is shown at various galleries in Paris, Brussels and Mexico City. There is no collage in Catté’s work. He tears and inks the material, and finds his rhythm in a certain degree of randomness. The cardboard itself refers to both its usefulness and to its most common eventual fate in a throw-away society. Catté’s cityscapes are sometimes representational and sometimes a reflection of inner resonance with the geometry of how we live.
Alan Sonfist (b. 1946 New York, NY) grew up in the Bronx where he developed a fascination with the city’s natural landscape. Sonfist pioneered an alternative approach to working with nature and culture. He sculpts from the outside in, reintegrating aspects of indigenous natural and cultural histories. For Sonfist, the outside bark of a tree tells the tree’s story. His work breathes new life into the relationship between art, nature, and city. Sonfist most notable solo exhibitions have been at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Guggenheim. Sonfist’s work is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Whitney.
Contact: Michelle Y. Loh, michelle.art100ny [at] gmail.com, T 347 668 8936 or T 917 388 3969
