Exhibition Location｜Rothko Museum, Latvia
The Rothko Museum and Wei Gallery are pleased to announce that the artist Tan Ping will have a major exhibition “Back and Forth: The Art of Tan Ping” at the Rothko Museum in Latvia from May 31st to August 25th, 2024. This exhibition honours Tan Ping's hybrid identity as an artist; not only was he educated in Beijing and Berlin, but his work fuses European and Asian elements – including the work of Mark Rothko. After this major exhibition, which will be the premiere show during the summer season at the Rothko Museum, the artist will have another European show at the Museum Ludwig, Koblenz in Germany.
We are pleased to invite those with a passion for art including Tan Ping’s collectors to attend the opening ceremony of “Back and Forth” on May 31st at the Rothko Museum.
The curator Philip Dodd has said on the 100th page of the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition:
“ Tan Ping's sophisticated and sensuous art challenges the tired but powerful orthodoxy visible in certain kinds of art history and in many contemporary accounts of wider historical developments that we are destined to live a silo existence where 'our' cultures are only contaminated (rather than enriched) by those of others.......Born in China and educated in Beijing and Berlin, Tan Ping is making art that is a salutary reminder that often the most arresting art - the kind that can respond to the intertwined complexity of our world - does indeed belong, but to various places and to a variety of traditions at the same time. Never has such art been needed more than at present.”
“Back and Forth”, the title of this exhibition, captures the restless inventiveness of Tan Ping's life as an artist. He has moved from woodcut to acrylic and back again, from figuration to abstraction, from diminutive to large-scale, from minimalist to maximalist, from painting to space and performance.
He was resident in Berlin when the Wall was demolished in '89 and it is hard not to see across all of his work an attempt to hold contraries together, to explore art and life beyond boundaries and borders: psychological; social and aesthetic.
Through 40 years of art practice, Tan Ping has been exploring many fields such as painting, printmaking, multimedia, design and so on. Tan Ping's exhibitions have been held all over Europe, and his works have been collected by the National Art Museum of China, Shanghai Art Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Ludwig Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, and other important institutions in China and abroad.
