Guo Wei

Vita

The two brothers Guo Wel and Guo Jin are among the most successful artists who have graduated from the renowned Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Guo Jin (born 1964 in Sichuan Province) paints wonderful landscapes with birds that bring traditional Chinese painting to life with their very own poetry. Characteristic of his paintings is the layer “Rust”, which lays over the representations like a veil and whose haptic surface gives them a sculptural character.

Guo Jin’s delicate painting is designed to work out the poetry of the figures. His delicate interpretations of classic themes enchant the audience. Although, for example.B, in the pictures of birds in nature, he refers to what already exists, they clearly bear the artist’s signature.

Compared to his brother’s raw, aggressive energy, Guo Jin’s poetic image bets seem almost timid, but he creates moments of beauty and romance without ever falling into the sentimentality trap. A painting that combines traditional contents of Chinese painting with Western influences Guo Wei (born 1960 in Sichuan Province) has been exhibiting internationally since 1988. At first glance, his realistic images seem like photographs, but on closer inspection one notices surprising deformations and blurred facial expressions. In his early works he mainly depicts children, his more recent images revolve around youthful selfishness and arrogance. But as distant as the image content may seem, they are about personal feelings. Guo Wei’s portraits of his daughter and her friends in monochrome shades of grey exude both familiarity and ferocity and often have a disturbing effect. One is confronted with grim young girls whose aggressive gestures seem to be aimed at both the painter and the audience. Their destructiveness is supported by brilliant compositions and provocative themes.

While Guo Jin conjures up the past in his works without becoming nostalgic, Guo Wel opens up a deeply original perspective with his hard, violent portraits of Chinese youth. The former, trained in Western art history, ventures into traditional Chinese painting, while his brother documents the existential fears of youth in China – and thus represents youth all over the world.

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