LOT DETAILS

Materials:

oil on canvas

Measurements:

31.50 in. (80.00 cm.) (height) by 62.99 in. (160.00 cm.) (width)

Markings:

signed and dated 2015.9 lower right

Condition:

framed

Literature:

Chen Liu was born in 1973 in Kunming China. He graduated from the renowned Tsinghua Fine Arts Institute in Beijing in 1996. Currently, Chen is employed as a professor at the Yunnan Academy of Fine Arts. Some of Chen’s more prominent work includes his famous fantastically grotesque creations, which are a result of the artist’s inspiration by American comics and Japanese manga. However, Chen has proclaimed himself to be a man of varied artistic taste. “I like extremes,” he says, “I can appreciate extreme beauty... but can also enjoy the ugliness of a gory scene in a horror flick.” This lot is a rare work in Chen’s body of work; there are none of the strange juxtapositions or cartoonish figures that make up Chen’s typical artistic idiom. In fact, the painting appears hyper-realistic in its rendering of a mountainous landscape. The jagged edges of the cliff and the cracks in the piles of rock, when contrasted against soft, gentle pillar of clouds demonstrate Chen’s self-proclaimed enjoyment of the extremes