Echo of the mountains.
Solo exhibition by Xunmu Wu curated by Claudio Rocca
On Thursday 8 August in Florence, the personal exhibition of Xunmu Wu , curated by Claudio Rocca , will be inaugurated in the prestigious halls of the Academy of the Arts of Drawing.
The exhibition, organized by the MA-EC Gallery of Milan , enjoys the patronage of the Tuscany Region and the Municipality of Florence and includes over 30 works by the Chinese master, oils on canvas, oils on slate and inks on paper.
In the history of painting, says Claudio Rocca, as well as in literature, we find nomadic souls: we know them as artist-travelers or variously as traveler-artists. We imagine the former to travel territories and cross rivers to find new depths of inspiration, where art is the final goal; the latter rather love the journey itself; therefore the journey represents the destination, destined then to become the object of painting. The difference is at times tenuous. What is certain is that in the research of the Chinese artist Xunmu Wu, the journey has become the very manifestation of his being a painter.
Xunmu Wu , born in Shanghai in 1947, after decades of extreme itineraries in the heart of China, has chosen to represent nature in its wildest aspects, in the footsteps of ancestral traditions, as interpreted by minorities who are still witnesses of a cultural heritage in danger of extinction.
Through a complex and material abstract painting, of informal inspiration, skies and lands, legends and apocalyptic phantasmagoria are evoked. The instinctive gesture becomes rarefied in the flow of time of creation and materializes in elaborate layers of different thickness, which overlap, elide, crowd one another, until they are freed in a line, a lump of color, a formal intuition that rises. Areas of different density, rhythm, sonority appear dynamically, as in a musical score that seems dictated by the urgency of instinct, but which allows very little to improvisation. Thanks to the use of color and brush strokes, the artist thus obtains a multidimensional effect: in the background cold colors that form a contrast with the bright yellow, red and white, and give the work a sense of movement and tension.
The inks on paper appear different: in the foreground mysterious characters stand out , equipped with long and threatening claws, while they engage in a furious saraband, with their black silhouettes against the backdrop of apocalyptic scenarios, represented by vortices of diluted greys that suggest valleys and deserts swept by storms of furious winds.
Ancient legends of those extreme lands materialize in Xunmu Wu's papers, mixing with the panic contemplation of nature. Deserts and highly evocative visions, suggesting immense spaces, solitude, nakedness and distance, but also that remote interior space that no telescope can reach, in its unfathomable and very private mysteries.
Xunmu Wu was born in Shanghai in 1947. He lived 17 years in the Gobi Desert and the hinterland of the Tianshan Mountains, and this experience had a great influence on his art, joys and sorrows of coexistence with nature have marked his soul. In the late 1980s, during a six-year journey on foot, he crossed the border mountain areas of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi, collecting and recording cultural traces. He currently lives and works in Shanghai. Among his most recent exhibitions, 2024 #Artforsustainability, Florence, 2023 Starry Sky of Shepherds at the Scalvini Museum in Desio, 2023 Salon des indépendants, Art Capital, Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris. In 2022 some of his works were selected for exhibitions in Genoa and he won the Fiorino d'argento at the Premio Firenze 2022, 2022 Time Tunnel, curated by Paolo Sabbatini, at the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels, 2021 Fiabe Antiche, Shanghai and online at www.wepresentart.com , 2021 Present Art Festival, Desio. In 2023 Xunmu Wu entered the CAM, the Catalog of Modern Art, Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori di Cairo Editore. In July 2024 some of his works were exhibited at the Giulio Galgani Art Gallery in Pietrasanta.
Event coordinates
Title: Echo of the mountains
Solo exhibition by Xunmu Wu curated by Claudio Rocca
Headquarters: Academy of the Arts of Drawing, Florence, Via Ricasoli 68
Opening: Thursday 8th August at 6pm
The exhibition will be introduced by Cristina Acidini
Sponsorship : Tuscany Region, Municipality of Florence, Academy of the Arts of Drawing
Organization : MA-EC Gallery
Project by : Peishuo Yang, Weizhen Jiang, Jiebao Liao
Info: info.milanart@gmail.com
Dates: until August 31, 2024
Tuesday-Saturday 10.00-13.00 and 17.00-19.00
Free admission
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