Wu Guanzhong art works: Abstraction and Architecture and the Everyday

The Chinese painter was born on July 5, 1919, in Yixing, Jiangsu province, China — died June 25, 2010, Beijing, China. He was well versed with Chinese ink and brushwork as well as Western oil-painting styles. His style of work is unique form of modern art typify by his acclaimed landscapes, many of which verged on abstraction. He graduated (1942) from the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou and studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He was inspired by many European painters such as Vincent van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani and Maurice Utrillo. When Wu returned to China in 1950, the government condemned his figure paintings as they were many of the nudes. In 1966–76, he was sent to the country as a labourer during the early years of the Cultural Revolution.

In the early 1970s, he was allowed to return to painting and by 1978 his works were being featured in the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. He participated in many exhibitions in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the U.S and Britain, and in1992 he was the first living Chinese artist to exhibit at the British Museum.The works that Wu Guanzhong created embody many of the major shifts and tensions in twentieth-century Chinese art.

Architecture and the Everyday

The most unique compositions that Wu created are found in those paintings depicting rural yet grand homes and towns that emphasize a constructed, man-made environment where traditional ink paintings emphasized the majesty and grandeur of the natural environment over small-scale structure or other architectural elements.

He extracted geometric beauty and a structural rhythm from architecture rather than including buildings as a small part of painting. To Wu, whether artists are painting buildings, rivers, mountains, grass, or trees, it is very important that they paint with feeling.

Abstraction

Wu’s landscapes became more and more abstracted in his later period. After 1990, most of these works show an aim to represent states of being, emotions, and concepts over more realistic representation. For example the works provide a closer view as if the viewer is fully immersed in the environment rather than showing birds-eye or long-view perspectives usually associated with ink landscape paintings.

On this subject he has said that he wants to express the transformations in space and time that occur in my mind. The many forms that he see with his eyes inspire the unpredictable transformations that he haven’t yet seen.

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