Event: London Art Fair 2020
Location: Arthill Gallery Booth G26
Preview: Evening of 21st January
Date: 21st - 26th January
Artists: Elio Ciol, Hans-Christian Schink, Yangyang Wei and Jingjing Guan
Arthill Gallery is pleased to announce that we will be participating in London Art Fair 2020. London Art Fair provides a space to showcase the most exceptional modern and contemporary art of our time, to discover and to buy. The Fair is an established destination for both museum-quality modern and contemporary work, nurturing collecting at all levels, from prints and editions to major works by internationally renowned artists.
Arthill Gallery will be showcasing some of the talented contemporary artists we have on our roster, including Elio Ciol, Hans-Christian Shink, Yangyang Wei, and Jingjing Guan.
Elio Ciol was born in 1929 in Casarsa della Delizia (Pordenone, Italy), where he still lives and works. He has practiced photography from a very young age, but in his fifties, Ciol developed his own personal language in landscape and documentary photography. His style continued to evolve over the years, as demonstrated in the wide collection of his projects. Ciol’s photographs are achieved by his meticulous attention to composition, interpretation and sensibility towards not only the portrayed subjects, but the intrinsic poetry within each image, which aims to evoke a story. Ciol’s work is part of the Neorealism movement in photography; a predisposition towards everyday life of ordinary people, depicted to induce social and political transformation. His focus as a documentary photographer started with the rural world, shifting to emigration (with a focus on the railway station) and finally to the life of children. His images are never aggressive – no display of grief, no insistent showing of suffering or death, not disturbing to look at – but rather, joyful in nature.
Elio Ciol also focused intensively on landscapes, mostly Italian. The contrast captured between light and shadow and the choice of black and white give rhythm to the photographs and highlight the vitality of the landscape. The harmonious dialogue between light and shadow brings a depth to the images and induces the spectator to read them through a visual perspective, going further than the bi-dimensional object. Viewers can find themselves completely enfolded in the landscape, leading to an interpretation that perhaps is more intense and unique than if they were standing there in reality. Elio Ciol’s work is characterised by its immense sensitivity towards places, architecture, people and landscapes. He has exhibited all over the world, including more than a hundred solo exhibitions. His ‘tender’ approach to documentary photography and his poetic eye towards the landscapes has bought him considerable awards in Italy and abroad. His work is part of collections in many international museums, including the V&A in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Hans-Christian Shink was born in 1961 in Erfurt, Germany. He studied photography at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts in Saxony under Jochin Jansong, and in 1993 he completed his postgraduate at the University of Leipzig. His work navigates the permanent relationship between human technology and nature through focus on aesthetic linear constants throughout the globe. His revolutionary technique of solarisation, equipped to great effect in his, 1h, series, creating ethereal apparitions within his work.
Schink has used this technique to document the movement of the Sun through the sky over the course of a one hour exposure. Schink’s masterful ability to create photographs with the stunningly interesting compositional aspect of the Sun’s abstracted movement through such technique alludes to the early photography work of Muybridge, as well as the ballistic reports produced by the physicists Ernst Mach and Peter Salcher, documenting the camera’s ability to capture movement in a way unlike the eye. 1h, reflects on the utopian character of analogue photography established from its inception, its definitive reality through chemical reactions to light exposure, however manipulating such affect to create alien intrusions.
Yangyang Wei's work, though containing surreal elements, skillfully uses the imageryand schematicstructure of traditional Chinese landscapepainting. Her works createa quiet, fresh and lyrical style in which the common features and sticky brush strokes of oil painting are replaced by the elegance of fitting of these landscape paintings. Wei’s workscreate a fantastic dreamlike effect and provide a refreshingvision free from the constraints of reality. This emerging artist hasfound a way to showcase aclassical sentimentthrough her works of contemporary art.
Jingjing Guan was born in Henan Province, China. She graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art in 2005. After, she had her advanced studies at the Material Art Studio of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Oil Painting Department. Five of her works have been published in the textbook Oil Painting Education—the Material Art Studio, published by Peking University Press for the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China. She has participated in the Edinburgh Arts Festival, Scotland, UK, and was selected the Annually BAZAAR ART First Feature 100 Favorite Artworks of 2013 (Bazaar Art Magazine).
London Art Fair is an unmissable opening to the international art calendar and we hope that you will join us in exploring the contemporary artwork that will be shown during this week.