Fang Lijun
Woodcuts and Drawings
January 27-April 17, 2006
Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz
Matthäikirchplatz 4
D – 10785 Berlin, Germany
Tue-Fri 10:00 – 18:00,
Sat -Sun 11:00 – 18:00
www.kupferstichkabinett.de www.alexanderochs-galleries.de
As the Beijing artist Fang Lijun was exhibited for the first time in Europe in the early 1990s, Colognes Museum Ludwig acquired an oil painting by the artist.
In 1993, this picture Group 2, No. 2, was printed on the title page of New York magazine and overnight the artist Fang Lijun was known as a painter, although he actually studied woodprinting at the Beijings Printmaking Institute.
In 1996, he returned to woodprints. After exhibitions of large format woodprints at the Shanghai Art Biennale as well as in museums in Asia and Europe, New Yorks MoMA showed a large format woodprint by Fang Lijun as part of its exhibition New Acquisitions.
Now, Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin is the first prominent museum to dedicate an exhibition especially to the woodprints of the artist Fang Lijun.
The Kupferstichkabinett Museum of Prints and Drawings (Berlin State Museums Foundation Prussian Heritage) possesses one of the largest collections of its kind. It is recognized as one of the world’s finest collections of graphic art with 110,000 drawings and about 550,000 prints, including works by great artists ranging from Botticelli, Dürer and Rembrandt to Menzel, Kirchner, Picasso and contemporary artists. Special focuses of the collection are shown in contemporary exhibitions.
Next to drawings and sculptures, the exhibition Fang Lijun Woodcuts and Drawings concentrates mostly on his expressive woodcuts as an important part of Fang Lijuns work. They are made as jigsaw puzzle prints. In this, the woodblock is cut apart to colour the different parts separately; here Fang uses single colour shades or the combination of two shades. Therefore, he adds a modern and monumental variant on Clair obscure printing which was used in European and Chinese 16th Century for the reproduction of coloured drawings.
Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz
Matthäikirchplatz 4
D – 10785 Berlin
Germany
Tue-Fri 10:00 – 18:00, Sat -Sun 11:00 – 18:00 www.kupferstichkabinett.de
