Exhibition

Ma Desheng: Selected Works 1979–1987

5 Nov 2015 – 26 Nov 2015

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Free

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Rossi & Rossi

London, United Kingdom

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Travel Information

  • 19,38,73, stop at Royal Academy of Art
  • Oxford Circus, Green Park, Piccadilly Circus
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Presenting a selection of works by Ma Desheng, one of China's most distinguished contemporary artists and founding member of the Stars group, the first post-Mao art group to challenge the totalitarian Chinese government.

About

For this year’s Asian Art in London, Rossi & Rossi is delighted to present a selection of works by Ma Desheng, one of China’s most distinguished contemporary artists and poets. A number of early Tibetan book-covers and Indian sculptures will also be on view.

Ma was one of the founding members in the late 1970s of the early avant-garde Stars Group—the first post-Mao art group to challenge the totalitarian Chinese government—which included fellow artists Huang Rui, Wang Keping, Qu Leilei and Ai Weiwei. In 1980, he was also instrumental in organising the first unauthorised public protest rally and march in China since the Communists came to power in 1949.

Selected Works 1979–87 will present a selection of the artist’s woodblock prints and ink paintings from the late 1970s to the 1980s. A self-trained artist, Ma’s boldly graphic woodblock prints are the result of his observations of peasants and workers in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. In direct contrast to the kitsch and brightly coloured Socialist Realism of propaganda imagery well established in China at the time, Ma’s highly expressive monochromatic prints were unusual for their portrayal of peasants and workers as sad, tired and distressed. The first Stars Art Exhibition, held in 1979 along the gates outside the National Museum, was poorly received by officials and resulted in the confiscation of the artworks after only two days, as well as Ma’s arrest. 

Subsequent crackdowns in the early 1980s led to the artist’s relocation to Europe, where in Paris he began to reevaluate his relationship with traditional Chinese ink painting. It was during this period that Ma was able to explore the naked female body and develop his sensuous nude ink-wash series. Influenced by the modernist forms in ancient Han Dynasty sculpture (206 BCE–220 CE) and the traditions of Song Dynasty painting (960–1129 CE), in which emphasis is placed on a minimalist line that is charged with expressionistic emotion, Ma captures the essence of his subjects with thick, strong black lines and rubbed brushstrokes.

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Ma Desheng

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