March 23–25, 2023
Hong Kong’s Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery will represent, on an exclusive basis, the work of Venezuelan modernist Oswaldo Vigas throughout Asia.
According to Catherine Kwai and Edward Fung, directors of the institution: “Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery is delighted to represent the work of Oswaldo Vigas (Valencia, Venezuela, 1923—Caracas, Venezuela, 2014), in Asia on an exclusive basis. Vigas is one of Latin America’s most prominent artists, who actively helped to shape the cultural life of his country and played a key role in the Parisian art scene between 1952 and 1964”. Major works of Vigas will be presented by the gallery at booth 3E03 at the coming Art Basel Hong Kong 2023, alongside a selection of important works by modern and contemporary artists Georges Mathieu, Lalan, Li Huayi, Shara Hughes, and Ziad Dalloul.
Profusely inspired by the origin of life, the Latin American landscape, its history, and mythology, Vigas’s work is rooted in a number of styles, such as Constructivism, Informalism, and Neo-figuration, all applied in a personal way. Prompted by a search for his mestizo identity, Vigas remained faithful to his own convictions, which led to authentic artistic imagery. He was the first Venezuelan artist to draw on the country’s forgotten pre-Columbian and African cultural patrimony, interweaving it with European and American modernism.
Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery—a pioneer in East-West artistic exchange
With its mission to build bridges between cultures, Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery was the first gallery in Hong Kong to promote French art, focusing on the painters of the École de Paris (School of Paris). In 1996, at a time when Western art was rarely seen on the Chinese mainland, Catherine Kwai curated a historical retrospective of painter Marcel Mouly at the Shanghai Art Museum. This was followed over the years by exhibitions of Informal Art painters such as Georges Mathieu, Zao Wou-Ki, Pierre Soulages and Lalan.
For more than three decades, Kwai Fung Hin has organized over 160 exhibitions in honor of artists from a wide range of European and Asian countries. Its curatorial strategy is based on a rigorous understanding of each artist’s biography, creative philosophy, and artistic development.
Right now the Gallery is showing a group exhibition “Worlds Beyond Reality — Monet’s Legacy” which centered around a masterpiece of Claude Monet created during his early years at Giverny – Pivoines (1887), alongside a selection of outstanding works of modernist Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, and Lalan, and contemporary artists David Hockney, Shara Hughes, Myonghi Kang and Ziad Dalloul, offering a rare opportunity of a comparative study of them, unveiling an interesting cross-section of Monet’s legacy.
Georges Mathieu and Oswaldo Vigas at Art Basel Hong Kong 2023
Among the works that the Gallery will present at the 2023 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong are a six-meter-wide painting titled Zonguldak (1978) by Georges Mathieu, which was part of a series of seven works that Mathieu created especially for his important retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1978. The paintings from this period exemplify the principles of lyrical abstraction that favor speed, intuition, risk, and free expression initiated by this fundamental figure of Informal Art.
The work Ancestral, 1976, by Oswaldo Vigas, a painting whose elongated white core suggests the shape of a pre-Columbian female deity from Venezuela (Venus de Tacarigua). This painting could be considered a tribute to the region’s first inhabitants, the true spiritual ancestors of the Venezuelan master.
In De paseo con su mascota, 2007, Vigas concentrates, with a sense of urgency, on contemporary daily life. Belonging to his latest period, this work is predominantly based on a strong black and balanced drawing that is then filled in by an elegant combination of colors. The images produced in the last years of the artist’s life are powerful, they are easy to read and, like in the late Miró’s works (whom he admired profoundly), they are still open to interpretations.
The Oswaldo Vigas Foundation launched in 2022 the Catalogue Raisonné of his oeuvre: the first complete online Catalogue Raisonné of any Venezuelan modern or contemporary artist. catalogue.oswaldovigas.com
Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery
10 Hollywood Road, Central
Hong Kong
Hours: Monday–Saturday 10am–7pm, by appointment only
T (852) 2580 0058
art [at] kwaifunghin.com
