Thursday 8 August 2024 a Firenze in the prestigious rooms of the Academy of Drawing Arts the personal exhibition of. will be inaugurated Xunmu Wu, Echo of the Mountains, edited by Claudio Rocca.
The exhibition, organized by the MA-EC Gallery of Milano, enjoys the patronage of the Region Toscana and the Municipality of Firenze and includes over 30 works by the Chinese master, oils on canvas, oils on slate and inks on paper.
In the history of painting, states Claudio Rocca, as well as in literature we find nomadic souls: we know them as artist-travellers or variously as traveller-artists. We imagine the first 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 to then become the object of painting. The difference is fleeting at times. What is certain is that in the research of the Chinese artist Xunmu Wu, travel 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 still witnesses of a cultural heritage in danger of extinction.
Through a complex and material abstract painting, of informal inspiration, heavens and lands, legends and apocalyptic phantasmagoria are evoked. The instinctive gesture becomes rarer in the passage of time of creation and materializes in elaborate layers of different thicknesses, which overlap, elide, pile up on each other, until they are freed in a line, a lump of colour, an intuition. formal that rises. Areas of different density, rhythm and sound appear dynamically, as in a musical score that seems dictated by the urgency of instinct, but which allows very little for improvisation. Thanks to the use of color and brushstrokes, 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: they stand out in the foreground mysterious characters, equipped with long and threatening claws, as they engage in a furious saraband, with their black silhouettes against the background of apocalyptic scenarios, represented by vortices of diluted grays that allow us to imagine valleys and deserts swept by storms of furious winds.
Ancient legends of those extreme lands therefore materialize in the papers of Xunmu Wu, mingling with the contemplating paniclazionor of nature. Deserts and highly evocative visions, which suggest immense, solitary spacesudine, nudity 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 for 17 years in the Gobi desert and in the hinterland of the Tianshan mountains, and this experience had a great influence on his art, the joys and sorrows of coexistence with nature marked his soul. In the late 80s, during a six-year walking journey, he crossed the mountainous border 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, Firenze, 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 will be selected for exhibitions in Genova and is the winner of the Silver Florin at the Prize Firenze 2022, 2022 Time Tunnel, curated by Paolo Sabbatini, at the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels, 2021 Ancient Tales, Shanghai, 2021 Present Art Festival, Desio. In 2023, Xunmu Wu joins CAM, the Catalog of Modern Art, Giorgio Mondadori Editorial by 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
Personal exhibition of Xunmu Wu curated by Claudio Rocca
Location: Academy of Drawing Arts, Firenze, Via Ricasoli 68
Opening: Thursday 8 August 18.00 hours
The exhibition will be introduced by Cristina Acidini
Sponsorship: Region Toscana, Municipality of Firenze, Academy of Drawing Arts
Organization: MA-EC Gallery
Project of: Peishuo Yang, Weizhen Jiang, Jiebao Liao
Info: info.milanart@gmail.com
Date: until the 31 August 2024
Tuesday-Saturday 10.00-13.00 and 17.00-19.00
Free admission
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