Painting Histories
July 7–September 3, 2023
From July 7 to September 3, 2023, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Yan Pei-Ming: Painting Histories, the largest exhibition ever devoted to the Franco-Chinese artist in Italy. The exhibition is part of the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art project, developed in partnership with the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati.
Curated by Arturo Galansino, the exhibition explores the artist’s powerful and highly original research into the relationship between image and reality through painted depictions of his personal life alongside important moments, figures, and icons from our collective history. Renowned for his deep and passionate reflection on painting in today’s art, Yan Pei-Ming urges us to rethink the relationship between history and the contemporary world, between memory and the present. Exploring such genres as portraiture, landscapes, still lives and historical painting, his pictures take their cue from the model of photographic images from different sources such as the artist’s own personal archive, magazine covers, film stills or celebrated works from art history.
Yan Pei-Ming: Painting Histories features over 30 works, several of which have been created especially for the exhibition, including two TIME magazine covers portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2008 and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2023. Making direct links with Italy, the exhibition also showcases a trilogy of new paintings based on famous photographs documenting dramatic moments in Italian’s recent political history: the discovery of Aldo Moro’s body in the boot of a car in Rome in 1978; the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Idroscalo in Ostia in 1975; and the bodies of Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci hanging upside-down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto in 1945. The exhibition alternates these emblematic images with monumental self-portraits and portraits of his mother and father or historical figures such as Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler, along with original interpretations of such canonical artworks as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Velazquez’s Innocent X.
Born in Shanghai in 1960, Yan Pei-Ming moved to France in 1980 where he still lives and works today. As he says himself: “I presume I am a Chinese and European artist, but I am first and foremost an artist.” Growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, he trained in European art history, merging techniques, sources and themes from the East and West. The iconography of Western visual culture plays a crucial role in the artist’s work, combined with subjects that find a direct echo in China, such as the tiger and the dragon or the figures of Mao and Bruce Lee, his childhood idol and an iconic link between East and West, between Hollywood and Hong Kong. Yan Pei-Ming is a painter of history and of stories, revisiting iconic moments from the past but also exploring personal histories and bringing an immediacy and human touch to images that have become ubiquitous through their reproduction. As he himself puts it: “I am not a romantic painter, I am a painter of our time.”
The exhibition is promoted and organised by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze as part of its Palazzo Strozzi Future Art project developed in partnership with the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati. Main supporter: Fondazione CR Firenze. Supporters: Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana, Camera di Commercio di Firenze, Intesa Sanpaolo and the Palazzo Strozzi Partners Committee. With a contribution from the Città Metropolitana di Firenze. With thanks to MASSIMODECARLO and Galerie Thaddeus Ropac.
