拍品描述：
款识：野 2002 Liu Ye（左下）
M. Schoeni 编，《刘野：红，黄，蓝》，少励画廊，2003年，第43页（图版）
Christoph Noe 编，《刘野：图录全集 1991-2015年》，柏林，Hatje Cantz出版社，2015年，编号 02-07，第304页（图版）
The appearance of Mondrian's paintings within my own paintings is spiritual. His paintings are so simply conceived with the most basic colours and vertical and horizontal lines. I also wish to address the question of simplicity.
— Liu Ye
The profile of a young girl with a bob haircut and a straight fringe, one of the artist’s recurring figures, stands at the far bottom right corner against a vast background of blue and pale yellow in Mondrian, Hello. Her gaze is transfixed towards the left, where a beam of light emanates from above, highlighting the rosy blush on her plump cheeks and brings attention to the Mondrian book she has in her hands as though she is a devout follower of geometric abstraction. The contour of her silhouette is instantly arresting and the manipulation of space through light and shadow to divide the painting geometrically congruently evokes scenes of Piero della Francesca’s diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza with his two figures in profile, an angle that ensured a good likeness and a faithful representation, Johannes Vermeer’s treatment of light in The Milkmaid, or indeed René Magritte’s elusive Not to Be Reproduced in front of a mirror all come tomind. Fresh to auction and painted in 2002, it is one of 40 works from Liu Ye’s body of work featuring Mondrian motifs, signifying the creation of a unique tableau, poised between two worlds: a place that is apparently real and credibly, removed from reality, that would dominate Liu’s work for the next decade.
(i) Piero della Francesca, Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, c. 1473-75
Image: Scala, Florence
(ii) Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1657-1658
Image: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
(iii) Rene Magritte, Not to Be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite), 1947
Image: Boijmans Van Beuningen
Artwork: © 2024 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Piet Mondrian: A Father Figure in Liu Ye’s Eyes
Liu Ye first encountered the work of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian while enrolled at the Industrial Design Department of the School of Arts and Crafts in Beijing from the age of fifteen to nineteenth. Describing the school as a secondhand Bauhaus, his teachers were sent abroad to study the Bauhaus theory before the Cultural Revolution and brought back methodologies of European modernism, in turn exposing Liu to graphic composition, constructivism, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian of course, who would eventually become a recurring source of inspiration for him. Initially viewing the Dutch painter as a designer, it was only until Liu’s six-month long artist residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 1998 that he finally formed a direct acquaintance with Mondrian’s work. As a pioneer of the abstract geometric form and a leading figure in the De Stijl movement, Mondrian was committed to distilling the visual world into its most basic elements in pursuit of a universal aesthetic language that aimed to achieve harmony and balance.
First appearance of a Mondrian motif seen in Boogie Woogie (Self Portrait), 1992
Brooklyn, 1994
An early recurrent reference to paintings by Mondrian, with its rigourous straight lines and balanced quadrilateral compositions, appeared in Liu Ye’s artwork early on in his career. It can first be found in Liu’s Boogie Woogie (Self Portrait) created in 1992, only the second year of his creative pursuits. Brooklyn (1994) announced the theme of a dual aspect, with the Mondrian painting depicted incredibly precisely as an actual painting standing on an easel situated in an imaginary situation and exemplifying its uncanny character of the small boy– the artist himself – sat reading, feet immersed in a bowl and a child’s hat appearing to flat above his head. Liu Ye’s insertion of Mondrian’s paintings into his own tableaux permeated his artworks throughout and influenced his artistic development in the post-2000s.
This influence taken from the modern master is far from simple, Liu’s delineation of the canvas and heightened geometrical partitioning in Mondrian, Hello with the diagonal shadow right through the centre of the painting form a sense of balance and correspondence. Completed with the girl holding onto the Mondrian painting to the bottom right, these elements form an equilibrium. Liu Ye completed four Mondrian-inspired canvases in the year of 2002, with all paintings possessing a similar sense of order and featuring the same motifs of the young girl with one or two Mondrian paintings – two of which had yellow as the base tone (as seen in Yellow and Hello, Mondrian) and one had blue as the base tone (as seen in Blue). Only in the present lot, Mondrian, Hello, that shows a combination of both yellow and blue tones employed by Liu, which despite its simplicity, is a testament to a more compact approach to line and form.
Liu Ye, Yellow, 2002
Liu Ye, Hello, Mondrian, 2002
Liu Ye, Mondrian, Hello (the present lot), 2002
Liu Ye, Blue, 2002
Among Liu’s myriads of sources, from early Renaissance paintings to a range of modern artists, Mondrian certainly occupied a special place among these disparate figures. The Dutch painter’s steadfast commitment to abstract painting and the self-contained formal rigour of his work have been both profoundly inspiring and somewhat intimidating for Liu. In his own words, he had long admired nonfigurative painting. However, in relation to his own creations, he has hesitated to fully embrace it, reluctant to abandon his parallel dedication to depiction and narrative of figurative painting. As such, Mondrian can be seen, in Liu’s eyes, a father figure: to be respected yet feared, admired yet challenged.
Liu’s Iconography of Children Encompassing Humanity
Born in Beijing in 1964 and growing up against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Ye spent most of his childhood living a censored and audited life in the countryside with his father but found freedom in the form of story books hidden by his parents. Born to a father who was a children’s playwright, Liu had the luxury of accessing a big black chest of Western children’s books under his bed. Encouraged perhaps by his father’s admiration for Western culture, and possibly tempted by a lingering sense of the forbidden nature of such material, Liu grew away from traditional Chinese art and conjured up an entire iconography of distinctive figures that were reminiscent of illustrations found in the books he grew up with.
With a particular love for Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray –which tells the story of an artist becoming infatuated with the youth of the subject of his full-length portrait; thereby selling his soul to ensure that the portrait, rather than himself, will age and fade– the story lays the seeds for Liu’s artistic style in the years to come and is the very reason why Liu never fails to plant upon his characters a sense of eternal childlike innocence, with their rotund face, ruddy cheeks and short statures - the cartoonish features of cherubic children. The ‘putto’ character is an image of Liu’s own childhood, and the autobiographical character of his art becomes more apparent throughout the years, while retaining a cryptic mode of presentation as if echoing Wilde’s pronouncement on the nature of art.
Oscar Wilde relaxing on the divan during his lecture trip through America, 1882
Through his distinctive autobiographical characters, the tableaux that Liu Ye creates is seen to have a dual aspect – drawing on observation and memory and rooted in reality and from that fusion, a domain of subjective reality emerges, accessible and impenetrable all at once. The invented space allows for personal exploration and expression while remaining guarded to an extent and the pictorial device of a child proved to be incredibly effective. In the guise of his many selves – whether as a young boy, a young girl, an adolescent sailor, or Miffy – these became a wider symbol evoking all of humanity.
Collector’s Digest
Having exhibited worldwide for over 30 years, Liu Ye’s prominence continues to shine on the international exhibition circuit. In 2024, he participated in David Zwirner’s 30th anniversary exhibition David Zwirner: 30 Years, held in Los Angeles from 23 May - 3 August 2024. His work has also been featured in prominent exhibitions at leading institutions, including the New Century Art Foundation in Beijing (2021), and Mondriaanhuis in Amersfoort, Netherlands (2016).
Renowned for his elegant, dreamlike, and intricately layered paintings, Liu Ye’s works have been acquired by numerous prestigious collections, including the Long Museum in Shanghai; M+ in Hong Kong; Today Art Museum in Beijing; the Olbricht Collection in Berlin; and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai.
来源:
香港，少励画廊
香港私人收藏
现藏者购自上述来源
文学:
M. Schoeni 编，《刘野：红，黄，蓝》，少励画廊，2003年，第43页（图版）
Christoph Noe 编，《刘野：图录全集 1991-2015年》，柏林，Hatje Cantz出版社，2015年，编号 02-07，第304页（图版）
压克力 画布
condition:
This work is in very good condition overall. There is no restoration apparent under Ultraviolet light. This work is framed under UV acrylic in a wood frame. Please note, this work has not been checked outside of its frame.
创作年代:
2002年作