We are pleased to present new paintings by Zeng Fanzhi, his first exhibition at the London gallery, following the Hong Kong exhibition last year.

Zeng's aesthetic restlessness epitomizes the evolution of Chinese contemporary art in the post-1989 era, grappling with local history and tradition in the face of external influence and accelerated change. Since the beginning of his career, he has presented a succession of powerfully introspective subjects, from the haunting Hospital paintings to the visceral Meat paintings that juxtapose human subjects with butchered flesh; from the enigmatic Mask paintings to candid and startling close-up portraits; from intimate, existential still-lifes to depictions of pivotal Western cultural figures such as Francis Bacon, whose psychic portraits altered the status of the human figure in twentieth century art. Charged with an underlying psychological tension, Zeng's oeuvre reveals the place of the unconscious and the aberrant in the construction of human experience.

For the past decade, landscape has been a central focus of Zeng's art. In highly tactile scenes, the details of representation often overlap seamlessly with qualities of abstraction, as in certain traditional Chinese aesthetic objects. All are expressionistically rendered with extraordinary attention to the material nuances of the painted surface. In densely worked paintings, such as Pure Land (2012) and Untitled (2012), gnarled branches crisscross over dark terrain, accented with swaths of white, teal, violet and rose. Zeng's fictitious place is at once luminous and bleak, where unearthly bursts of vivid color are trapped in snaking brambles that obstruct yet hold the gaze. Filled with brushwork that is both refined and heavily textured, the thick surfaces underscore the physicality of Zeng's painting process. Against these haunting landscapes, the bare yet resilient trees that survive in such harsh conditions hold the promise of renewal and rebirth.