HU Zi: Dark Side: Solo Exhibition

5 - 30 September 2020

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Overview

They are in the color of merlot, the same color as coagulated blood. The skin is slightly fairer, the hair slightly duskier. They are gazing in the same direction.

“ Look, Michelangelo, her skin is pale, like a Carrara marble.”
“ Straight nose, grim and dangerous eyes, the face of a knight.”
“ Rembrandt, her eyes are also black, like a falling black diamond.”
“ Orange lips merely open, moist and evil. Pope, is she honest?”
“ If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away.”
“ Velázquez, she is walking even closer toward you.”
“ Same as the dark soul, is the dark side of a beaming light.”

They are in the color of merlot, the same color as coagulated blood. The flesh is slightly lighter, the soul slightly darker.
— Hu Zi

In her fourth exhibition at Don Gallery, Hu Zi presents her latest series of paintings Dark Side. She appropriates iconic portraits of sixteenth and seventeenth century kings and queens and fellow artists and refigures them into eleven minimalistic, pop-like images tormented by the dark side of the Renaissance and Enlightenment—periods during which both the arts and slavery flourished in tandem. Many of these images are so ingrained in the institutionalized western canon — Michelangelo, Titian, Velázquez, King Philip IV, Rembrandt, Alexander Pope, Elizabeth I of England, and Marie Antoinette… “These historical figures and their portraits have been reproduced in art history books and museum postcards ad infinitum — that we have become desensitized to them. Hu Zi’s variations gives us a fresh perspective, and makes us look anew.” (Andy Cohen) This series continues her own tradition of portrait making, and each of these portraits could be read as her self-portrait too.

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