July 3, 2023

Yan Pei-Ming at Palazzo Strozzi

From 7 July to 3 September, the largest exhibition ever dedicated in Italy to the Franco-Chinese artist

From 7 July to 3 September Palazzo Strozzi presents Yan Pei-Ming. Painter of Stories, the largest exhibition ever devoted in Italy to the Franco-Chinese artist, part of the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art project developed with the Hillary Merkus Recordati Foundation. Renowned for a profound and passionate reflection on painting in today's art, in his monumental canvases Yan Pei-Ming combines history and contemporaneity, famous works of art, public figures and intimate subjects.

Curated by Arturo Galansino, General Director of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition offers an itinerary of over thirty works that allow us to explore the artist's powerful and original research into the relationship between image and reality, in a short circuit between personal life and collective history, symbols and icons of culture and art history between East and West.

Renowned for a profound and passionate reflection on painting in today's art, Yan Pei-Ming invites us to rethink the relationship between history and contemporaneity, memory and the present. Exploring genres such as portraiture, landscape, still life and history painting, his paintings come to life from the model of photographic images extrapolated from different sources, such as personal images, newspaper covers, film stills or famous works of art history. Yan Pei-Ming leads us to reflect on the contradiction between reality and representation, truth and the construction of images, an increasingly central theme in the era of digital reproduction and sharing of public history and our private lives.

Thus, the exhibition alternates monumental self-portraits and portraits of his mother and father or historical figures such as Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler with original reinterpretations of works such as Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Velázquez's Innocent X or two 'Time' magazine covers dedicated respectively in 2008 to Russian President Vladimir Putin and in 2022 to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

"Yan Pei-Ming's painting is powerful and direct, as he himself says: "it is not a caress," says Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition. "With this exhibition Palazzo Strozzi continues its mission to create a dialogue between past and present, involving artists who know how to interpret our time. Yan Pei-Ming reflects on the human condition, blending together different sources between reality and imagination, private life and public history".