ZENG FANZHI

Left: LUCIAN FREUD [2011] - 180x180cm - Oil on canvas |Right: PORTRAIT [2004] - 200x150 cm - Oil on canvas

“Zeng Fanzhi is a contemporary Chinese painter. Known for his Expressionist and psychologically probing portraits, he depicts human faces with vivid and lively brushworks that can at times border on abstraction. Zeng often will portray his subjects as seen through a dense thicket of branches, crowding and obscuring the canvas with a chaotic and stylized sense of malaise.”

BLUE [2015] - 400x700cm - Oil on canvas

“In parallel to his experimentations with ‘landscape’ painting, Zeng continued to forge ahead with a more experimental language in his portraiture studies: the We series comprises distorted faces painted at extremely close range, employing large, circular brushstrokes that create a frenzied and urgent presence. These paintings are produced by a method that requires intense physical involvement: Zeng uses his entire body, stretching across the breadth of these large-scale canvases to apply color with multiple paintbrushes simultaneously.”