Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Tiergarten

Esther Schipper

Liu Ye: Internationale Architektur

11. September – 23. Oktober 2021

Esther Schipper is pleased to present Liu Ye’s Internationale Architektur, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. On view will be twelve recent paintings, created between 2017 and 2021.

Among the motifs on which the exhibited works draw are the 1925 Bauhaus building complex by architect Walter Gropius in the German town Dessau, the Rietveld-Schroeder House designed in 1924 by the Netherlandish architect Gerrit Rietveld in Utrecht, and a 1968 equestrian estate built by the Mexican modernist architect Louis Barragán. Two works from 2021 depict figures wearing the iconic costumes the German artist Oskar Schlemmer designed for his experimental Triadic Ballet in the early 1920s, while another work, Prelude, also pictures a stage-like space, this one screened almost entirely by a red curtain from behind which a figure is looking out. Also on view are works from Liu Ye’s series of book paintings, depicting pages from the 1942 edition of Karl Blossfeldt’s Wunder in der Natur and the cover of the first publication from the so-called Bauhaus Bücher, Internationale Architektur, published in 1925.

Liu Ye’s work combines both direct and oblique references to the history of art to create a charged personal iconography that draws on real and imagined works of art, fictional and reallife figures. His work is informed by a sophisticated conflation of formal principles and conceptual ideas from both Asian and Western cultures. The recurring depictions of works quoting the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian evoke the history of abstraction, a topic Liu Ye has explored throughout his recent work which plays on the ambiguity of representational and abstract motifs.