Future exhibition
TAN PING. Body of Abstractions
01.12.2024 – 26.01.2025
Tan Ping (born 1960 in Chengde, Hebei, China) belongs to the generation of artists who played a decisive role in the reorientation of Chinese painting after the opening of China.
His work is characterised by a confident abstract formal language in which he alternates between painterly and graphic gestures. Trained in the Chinese tradition and at the same time experienced in the forms of Western art since the late 1980s, he is able to develop a global visual language that unites cultures. These are the Western painting tradition and its painterly techniques as well as a return to the spiritual roots of Chinese ink painting. Almost imperceptibly, he interweaves both conceptual levels in his works and experiments above all with the possibilities of pure colour painting. His works are characterised by a loose brushwork and a mostly fluid application of paint, which often unfold large, almost monochrome backgrounds and the recurring motif of line networks that spread across the picture surface. Line and surface enter into a vital dialogue.
Tan Ping was most recently a professor at the Chinese National Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (CAFA), where he was also its vice president. He completed his degree in printmaking there in 1984. As the winner of the “West German Cultural Exchange Scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)” in 1989, he came to Germany and studied at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin, where he graduated with a Master of Arts and as a master student in the Free Art Department, Kunsthochschule, Berlin. He is regarded as a leading figure in Chinese abstract art, a pioneer of contemporary Chinese art design and a promoter of the development of experimental art. In the 40 years of his artistic career, Tan Ping has constantly explored various fields such as painting, printmaking, multimedia and design. His works are collected by major galleries and museums in China and abroad, including Ludwig Forum, Aachen, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, Portland Art Museum and Trapholt Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.
Works by him were already on display at the Ludwig Museum in 2017 in the group exhibition “China – Transmission”. The current exhibition will be the first museum presentation in Germany.
Tan Ping, Ohne Titel, 2022, Acryl auf Leinwand, 102×153cm, © Tan Ping, 2024