Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to present a focus on the Chinese artist He Wei. Born in 1987, in the province of Anhui (eastern China), He Wei begins his artistic studies in China. He later moves to Italy, where he attends the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, a city where he discovered a totally new existential dimension, which has eventually marked his artistic and visual language.
The artist's research, dedicated to the investigation of shapes, forms and colors, goes from the beauty to the ugliness, from certainty to doubt, from exteriority to interiority. In recent works, the investigation of an emotional turmoil is particularly accentuated, and it is expressed in a very rhythmic and pulsing language. The signs, shapes, scratches and scribbles. All intertwined between the realistic-figurative compositions of anonymous bodies and the abstract chromatic inserts that force us to go beyond the real figure of the visible.
He Wei is a methodical and thoughtful artist, who carefully observes the world around him. He develops virtual sketches, following a well-detailed creative scheme, where everything becomes a calculated fruit of his mind. In particular, a recent series of abstract sculptures reflect this vision and approach. The works are the result of He Wei’s long research on balance and formal perfection, physicality of the work as well as craftsmanship and art. The concepts that once were contemplated by the theorists of neoplasticism, minimalists or the founders of the Bauhaus School. These enigmatic structures reflect the aesthetic vision of He Wei which finds application both in the field of sculpture and that of painting.
The artist’s research encourages the public to analyze the complexity of explaining «aesthetic» facts and re-elaborating the hierarchy of «beauty».
In his recent paintings, He Wei analyses and dismantles the portrait, to create a stronger and more violent perception compared to his previous canvases, characterized by the cancelation of the face through graffiti or coloured geometric shapes. The result of the new portraits is truly fascinating thanks to the use of very strong and incisive colours and studied and skilful oil spots and brushstrokes.
The artist has assigned titles of psychotropic drugs to the works, giving them a curative function (they are medicines of distorted reality) and at the same time they are representation of contemporaneity, in need of rebalance the excess of psychosis and schizophrenia through drugs.
In this whirling sensation of confusion and instability, the spectator is brought straight into this art of transition, towards future forms.
For more information about the artist, click
here!