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Ni Youyu
“Big Dipper”

12 March – 23 April, 2016

Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to announce the first solo show with the Shanghai-based artist Ni Youyu (*1984 in Ganzhou, China).  Ni Youyu’s artistic practice links Far-Eastern and Western philosophical and aesthetic perspectives. The theme of the perception of time plays a central role here, reflected in the genesis of his works, a process that sometimes takes years. His works unite historical elements with contemporary, current thinking, always paying attention to symbolic meaning.

“Big Dipper” presents work from the previous three years, many of which were recently shown at his first solo exhibition at MOCA Taipei. “Water Paintings”, which were repeatedly ‘washed’ with large quantities of water to achieve the antique and woodcut-like black contours, are by now already classics in Ni Youyu’s oeuvre, similarly to the “Coin Paintings”. The latter are coins that have been beaten continuously to form flat little plates, image carriers, upon which Ni Youyu paints supposed Zen gardens with the most delicate of brushes. Furthermore, the show also presents the series of “shrines”. For these, the artist transformed vintage wooden pinball machines, collected all over the world during his travels, into still life objects by painting on them, adhering materials onto them, or furnishing them with other ready-mades, so that they look like a cross between science fiction games and religious devotional objects.

Ni Youyu graduated in 2007 from the Fine Art College of Shanghai University, and since then has exhibited in various exhibitions in Chinese and international institutions and galleries. In 2012, he had a solo show at the Shanghai Art Museum. In 2014, he was honoured with two solo shows at the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts and the Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and was also awarded the CCAA Contemporary Chinese Art Award as “Best Young Artist”

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Tal R
“Garbage Man”

12 March – 23 April, 2016

Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to present the exhibition „Garbage Man“, with TAL R (*1967 in Tal Aviv, Israel) – our eleventh solo exhibition with the artist.

„Garbage Man“ – could refer to Tal R himself as manic collector of what other people would perhaps refer to as refuse. Collecting and arranging of images is an integral component of his artistic practice and arises in its own manifestation from an inner necessity. The Yiddish word “Kolbojnik” (Waste, Remains) also runs through the work of the artist within the titling of many of his works. His collection, which can be found within the individual collages, consists of an eclectic mix of “primitive tribal art”, art history masterpieces, pornos, comics, private photos, childhood pictures, sketches and picture book illustrations, and was collected by Tal R over a period of 25 years. In 2013 he then compiled and arranged the collection within 200 frames as the complete installation “Garbage Man”.

The works evoke in their pseudo-encyclopaedic phenomenon associations, Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, or, to refer to another artist, the Atlas by Gerhard Richter. Similar to him, the arranged pieces within the collages from “Garbage Man” served and serve the artist also as templates for paintings and sculptures. The horror vacui, which overwhelms us in every individual collage, becomes more potent through the – frame to frame – hanging of the work.

„Garbage Man“ was first shown in 2013 in Tal R’s large museum exhibition „The Virgin“, at ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark. After the presentation at Art Unlimited in Basel 2015, the exhibition now at Contemporary Fine Arts this March will be the third iteration of the installation.