Untitled No. 42022-12
Shen Chen
沈忱
Production date
2012
Object Detail
Media
acrylic on canvas
Measurements
168 x 121 cm
Notes
Like others of his generation, when he was in junior high school during the Cultural Revolution, Shen Chen had painted billboards and dramatic ‘big character posters’, becoming familiar with ink and brush in the process. And long before he had seen any western modernist or abstract painting, Shen had been inspired by his discovery of the work of the great ink painter Bada Shanren (c. 1626–1705). The minimalist nature of his depictions of landscape, and the perfection of the empty spaces in them, fascinated Shen Chen. He began to think that ‘how’ a painting was made was more important than ‘what’ was represented – a revolutionary idea at this time – and he began to experiment with abstract mark making that loosely referenced calligraphy and ink painting. Much later, when he first saw the work of the American abstract expressionists, he identified a connection between the black brush marks and voids of Franz Kline and the ink paintings that Bada Shanren had made three hundred years earlier.
The webs of mutual east/west artistic influence are complicated, however: Shen Chen also admires the great American abstract painter Agnes Martin, who worked with spare compositions of grids and stripes for more than forty years. In her work he sees the hand of a kindred spirit, an ‘aesthetic of silence’. In works such as Untitled No. 42022–12 (2012) a similarly restrained, highly controlled physicality and sensitive use of layered washes of colour is evident. When Shen discovered that Martin’s penciled markings don’t extend to the edges of her canvases, he too decided to apply a system of leaving the top and bottom edges of his canvases unpainted, a decision that required even greater control of his brush. Yet despite his love of restraint, from around 2011 his paintings reveal a more exuberant sense of colour; applied with precise, almost scientific, gradation strong washes of orange, green, red and blue create new hues at the points where they overlap.
The webs of mutual east/west artistic influence are complicated, however: Shen Chen also admires the great American abstract painter Agnes Martin, who worked with spare compositions of grids and stripes for more than forty years. In her work he sees the hand of a kindred spirit, an ‘aesthetic of silence’. In works such as Untitled No. 42022–12 (2012) a similarly restrained, highly controlled physicality and sensitive use of layered washes of colour is evident. When Shen discovered that Martin’s penciled markings don’t extend to the edges of her canvases, he too decided to apply a system of leaving the top and bottom edges of his canvases unpainted, a decision that required even greater control of his brush. Yet despite his love of restraint, from around 2011 his paintings reveal a more exuberant sense of colour; applied with precise, almost scientific, gradation strong washes of orange, green, red and blue create new hues at the points where they overlap.
Accession number
2017.082