Artists who have previously exhibited at firstsite include;
Bridget Riley, Anthony Gormley, Yoko Ono, Tessa Farmer, Hiraki Sawa, Amanda Ansell, Tom Hackett, Maria Ezcurra, Phil Collins, Sandy Sykes, Mark Dion, Nicolas Robbio, Jane Frederick, Laura White and Andrew Bracey, aswell as many other exciting contemporary practitioners.
Present
In the isolated and remote villages of rural China breathtaking portrait artist Chen Shaofeng has been working on a masterpiece.
His art has been to paint scores of Chinese villagers - while they in turn paint him. The exercise is a study of the relationship between the painter and the painted. But when presented the over all effect is far more than that. Hundreds of the portraits have been produced and are presented en mass - hundreds of pictures side by side with one another. The portrait of the villager next to the villager´s portrait of the artist.
The effect is to reiterate the relationship between the two painters while at the same time throwing into stark relief the views of two utterly differing worlds. Chen´s sober and traditional, well trained images are compared to the coarsely drawn portraits depicting Chen. More isolated that ever as their country´s urban centres march to modernity, the Chinese villagers show part of their soul - their paintings giving the villagers a voice. Crucial to this is the point that the villagers paint Chen as they saw him.
Future
The following artists will be exhibiting at firstsite in the near future:
19 August - 7 October 2006
Garrett Phelan
19 August - 7 October 2006
Jo Coupe
19 August - 16 September 2006
Charles Debenham
Artist Space
14 October - 23 December 2006
Residue
For more information on the work of each artist, please visit the firstsite website on the below link.
