| With the exhibition the Ludwig Museum intensely continues its special interest in the presentation of Chinese art in Germany in the year 2008. Subsequent to the exhibition Qi Yang - Beyond the heaven in 2006 and Gao Xingjian - La fin du monde in 2007 follow now the exhibition DAO - Georg Ahrens und Deng Guo Yuan in early spring and the exhibition China's Vision - Fokus Bejing in late autumn.
The examination with Chinese painting especially with Indian ink painting is presented by the two artists Georg Ahrens and Deng Guo Yuan in several different ways.
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Deng Guo Yua
Tianjin (China) |
Deng Guo Yuan, professor and director of the academy of art in Tianjin (China) is well-known for a progressive painting - long before China opened to the west. Only a few years ago he gave attention to Indian ink again as a medium besides painting. In his partly very large-sized works with India ink he deals with nature as main theme.
In his set In the Garden Deng Guo Yuan concentrates on the materials India ink and rice-paper which dominate the traditional Chinese landscape-painting. Again the important relation to Konfuzius becomes clear according to whom a painter should not slavishly copy things but also not work without relation to reality. The artist only works with a special Indian ink brush sometimes laying the colour accurately thin another time ponderous whereby all compositions do remember of the great impressionists like Claude Monet with his garden-pictures from Giverny.
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Deng Guoyuan, In the Garden,
90,5 x 97,5 cm, 2006 |
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Deng Guo Yuan, In the Garden
Nr. 38, 90,5 x 97,5 cm, 2006 |
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| Georg Ahrens at work |
Georg Ahrens, born in Koblenz, is sculptor and draughtsman as well as director of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Bildender K ünstler (workgroup of plastic artists) am Mittelrhein (AKM). He travels to China for more than ten years and works as visiting professor at the academy in Tianjin since 1994. He becomes inspired by a foreign culture thousands of years old which - beside him - influenced a lot of European artists of the 20th century with its great attraction, especially those of the fifties. In this examination Georg Ahrens developed his own language of Indian ink painting on rice-paper which gets mounted on a picture roll. It draws near to the Chinese way of thinking as much as it distances itself from it. Also it is not difficult to see that the style of his works is still “western”. His new cycle Joggling in the City is the result of a working process of two months at the Academy in Tianjin.
To run the exhibition under the principle of DAO follows the wish of both artists. In their complementary artistic style one draws near to nature as a liberating and ground-breaking might while the other looks for an explanation of being in the dissonance of the world.
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| Georg Ahrens |
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| Georg Ahrens |
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