西岸 | WEST BUND

ShanghART Gallery x Sadie Coles HQ：Condo Shanghai

2018.07.09 - 08.26

Exhibition

	2018.07.09 Monday - 08.26 Sunday

Artists:	Uri ARAN, BIRDHEAD, GENG Jianyi, Ryan SULLIVAN
Opening:	2018/07/07, 11:00-18:00
Duration:	2018/07/09-08/26, 11:00-17:00 (Mon. Closed)
Location:	West Bund, Bldg.8, 2555 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District,Shanghai

The first edition of CONDO Shanghai is hosted in partnership with Sadie Coles HQ at ShanghART Gallery West Bund Bldg.8. This exhibition features works by two artists from each gallery: Shanghai artists Geng Jianyi and Birdhead alongside Uri Aran and Ryan Sullivan, both based in New York. Spanning a diverse range of mediums – including painting, photography and installation – the exhibition showcases four distinct practices, each reflective of a particular voice and context. At the same time, it points towards shared sensibilities – in particular, an impulse towards reconciling disjunctive elements (whether images, colours or gestures) into tentative, ambiguous wholes.

Uri Aran, Another Welcome, 2016, Oil on HDO, bronze installation, dimension variable, painting , 81.2 x 61 x 1.9 cm

Uri ARAN

Uri Aran works across a variety of media and subject matter to construct a language of indeterminate signifiers, questioning the discord of meaning in language and the potential for its reconsideration.

Birdhead, Paaions Bloom Ambitions-2017-28, 2017, Acrylic on gelatin silver print, 90 x 115 cm

©Artist and ShanghART Gallery

BIRDHEAD

The artistic practice of Birdhead (Song Tao b.1979, Ji Weiyu b.1980) is based on photographs but also beyond the philosophy of photography. Capturing all the beings around them, Birdhead digest and apply the thinking mode of conceptual art into the context of their image interpretation. By combining the photographic matrix, collage, particular mounting technique and so on, Birdhead delivers a “Birdheadworld” in various exhibition spaces and humanistic environment. The main material of Birdhead's latest series Passions Bloom Ambitions comes from the wasted photos and test strips produced in the darkroom. Most of the works are formed with collage and painting materials.

Geng Jianyi, D-3 | Stubborn Image D-3，2016, Signal lamp, motor, hand paint, 20 x 20 x 29 cm

©Artist and ShanghART Gallery

GENG Jianyi

Darkness comes in silence. It inflexibly fills all the holes and cracks. A hearsay goes that something is happening when everything is invisible.

A strong presentiment comes that no matter how hard they tried, both of disciples and heretics will be defeated by the time.

Ryan Sullivan, Untitled，2018, Cast urethane resin, fiberglass, epoxy, 213.4 x 152.4 cm

Ryan SULLIVAN

Distinctive and unrepeatable, Ryan Sullivan’s works have been praised for their assertion of painting's enduring critical importance and potential. Built up in reverse – by pouring layers of paint into specially designed moulds, the artist pairs the act of painting right back to its raw process.

Traceable throughout the different works in the exhibition is an interest in the shifting relationship between part and whole, or between fragment and totality. Despite their radically different approaches and styles, the artists are united by an impulse to subsume eclectic parts into a larger system, while at the same time resisting the glibness or finality of a ‘complete picture’.