Yan Pei-Ming @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg - Against the Light

Yan Pei-Ming: Against the Light

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg

Through 23 december 2020

Yan Pei-Ming’s new series of works explore the complexities of current global developments and their multilayered impact, on a societal as well as a personal and emotional level. While in recent years Yan Pei-Ming’s practice has been characterised by his engagement with the works and legacies of other painters, including Gustave Courbet, this exhibition marks the artist’s return to the self. Created during the last few months, the self-portraits and still-lifes of this exhibition are pervaded by feelings of constriction and solitude experienced during the artist's confinement. In these diverse paintings, Yan Pei-Ming examines the unprecedented inner conflicts of the present moment in an intimate and piercingly direct way. 

 

Deeply rooted in the tradition of European painting, Yan Pei-Ming’s works are interrelated by their shared preoccupation with the passing of time. The key themes of his paintings have long concerned history or the history of art and classical pictorial themes remain prevalent in this new series. Yan Pei-Ming’s still-lifes depicting skulls are reminiscent of vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, but also of modernist artists like Paul Cezanne. The works evoke established iconographic connotations such as the transience and fragility of life, while also embodying a universal and very contemporary quality – a duality characteristic of the artist. Painted in a period of physical isolation, during which each day resembled the next, the passage of time gained a new dimension for the artist, prompting him to re-examine this classic theme for the first time in three decades. His subjects tread a line between traditional forms of representation and contemporary cultural relevance, inviting interpretation from a classical perspective as well as from the present moment. 

 

Yan Pei-Ming’s self-portraits document a certain turning point in the artist’s work. He has recently returned to this genre of painting, which was significant during the first stages of his artistic development, after avoiding it for over 30 years. 

I did my first self-portrait at the age of thirteen. As I had no model, I painted myself with the help of a mirror, without bothering anyone. [...] When I arrived in Europe, I made a trip to Amsterdam and saw Rembrandt's self-portraits. Since then, I haven't taken up the subject again. When you look at his self-portraits, you can see the passage of time. It's so extraordinary, it disturbed me. I said to myself: I'm going to think about it and I've been thinking about it for ten years. Yan Pei-Ming

The portraits show the artist from different angles, becoming a sustained reflection on his own image during the recent period of isolation. These works document his emotions at specific moments, like snapshots of his mental state, captured at different times of day and under different lighting conditions. In Self-portrait with Mask Yan Pei-Ming’s inquisitive and direct gaze, emphasised by the concealment of his lower face, captivates the viewer in a haunting way. The portrait visualises a key cultural moment – the ubiquity of the mask – while capturing emotions that are paradoxically as universal as they are isolated. 

 

A very personal retrospective with a focus on self-portraits, which opens at the Musée Unterlinden in 2021, will serve to further cement this inward turn in Yan Pei-Ming's practice.

GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC - VILLA KAST

Mirabellplatz 2, A-5020 Salzburg

www.ropac.net

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Irving Penn @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg - Still Life

Irving Penn: Still Life
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg
Through 16 July 2019

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents the exhibition Still Life by American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009), devoted to his still lifes, including the well-known series Street Material, Cigarettes and Flowers. The exhibition features over 30 photographs taken in New York over six decades for publications such as Vogue, as well as on his travels. Irving Penn created some of the most memorable still lifes of our time, and his innovative portraits, still lifes, fashion and beauty photographs made his reputation as one of the most high-profile and influential photographers of the 20th century.

Irving Penn began his career as a photographer in 1943 at the suggestion and with the encouragement of Alexander Liberman, then art director of US Vogue. The same year, one of Irving Penn’s colour photographs for Vogue appeared on the cover of their October issue, showing the first photographic still life in the magazine's recent history. In the ensuing 60 years, he took more than 150 cover photographs for Vogue and produced pioneering editorials, which became known for their natural lighting and formal simplicity, making him the leading photographer in the field. At a time when photography was understood primarily as a means of communication, Irving Penn approached it with an artist's eye, expanding its creative potential in both his professional and his personal work. 

Many of Irving Penn's still lifes combine food with everyday objects. He staged laid tables with exquisite arrangements of dishes, fruit and vessels, reminiscent of the Dutch masters of the Golden Age like Willem Kalf or Pieter Claesz. A cut-open watermelon, a crumpled linen table-napkin, a broken-off piece of baguette or a fly sitting on ripe fruit relate to the transience symbolised in vanitas paintings and emphasise the absence of the human being. The choice of subjects and the context of the objects also call to mind Georges Braque's early Cubist pictures. 

"The extreme deliberateness of these still-life arrangements – far from the traditional mock simplicity of a few pieces of fruit, a few flowers – adds to the sense that the objects are codes, that they carry a message even beyond the one the title announces" (Adam Kirsch, 2017).

The individual states of decay illustrated in the Cigarettes photographs show an interesting correlation with human characteristics, and may also be interpreted as memento mori. Irving Penn's first solo exhibition at MoMA in New York took place in 1975 and featured exclusively the Cigarettes series, which was perceived as a provocation and contrast to his popular earlier fashion photographs. Irving Penn’s interest in the theme led him to photograph other litter he found in the street, such as flattened paper cups or old playing-cards. Through his lens, street litter – which most people prefer to ignore – became something fascinating, almost iconic, however, while simultaneously expressing an explicit consumer criticism through them. 

Irving Penn composed his still-life photographs like a painter, working with large-format cameras, and was tireless in his attempts to expand the creative possibilities of the medium. He was deeply involved in each stage, from the meticulous composition of the picture to making his own prints. Unlike most other art photographers, he experimented with platinum-palladium and silver gelatin prints in order to lend each of his works a distinctive texture and original character. With his unique signature and stringently reduced aesthetic, he remains a defining stylistic influence, an inspiration to countless successors. 

In 2017, to mark the centenary of his birth, a comprehensive retrospective entitled Centennial was held at the Grand Palais in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the C/O Berlin. The exhibition consisted of some 240 works, including an extensive presentation of his diverse still lifes, some of which are shown in the Salzburg exhibition. Irving Penn's photographs have been displayed in many exhibitions worldwide, including Irving Penn: Underfoot at The Art Institute of Chicago (2013), Irving Penn: Diverse World at the Moderna Museet/Malmö (2012, and subsequently at the Kumu Art Museum/Tallinn), Irving Penn: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery/London (2010) and Irving Penn: Small Trades at the J. Paul Getty Museum/Los Angeles (2009-2010).

Irving Penn's works are represented in distinguished private and public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Maison Européenne de la Photographie/Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art/New York, Moderna Museet/Stockholm, Morgan Library and Museum/New York, Museum of Modern Art/New York and the National Gallery of Art/Washington DC.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has represented The Irving Penn Foundation, in collaboration with the Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, since September 2017.

GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG
Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg
www.ropac.net