Chunqing Huang – Painter’s Portrait II

Frankfurt-based artist Chunqing Huang’s series Painter’s Portrait will have its Berlin premiere at 68projects in January 2022.

Since 2016, the artist has been producing portraits of painters on 40 × 30 cm canvases. Of the 100 planned works, around 80 have already been completed. The first part of the series was exhibited in summer 2021 at the Kunsthaus and the Museum Wiesbaden. Under the title Painter’s Portrait II, 30 new works will be shown at 68projects from January 15, 2022.

Chunqing Huang’s Painter’s Portraits are abstract. Vibrant colours alternate with delicate or muted tones; bright, colourful paintings stand next to sombre works. Nervously scattered blots, brushstrokes, and knots contrast with clearly defined lines. Some works appear chaotic, while others exude an almost meditative calm and equilibrium. Although there are affinities among the paintings, no two are alike. Each portrait evokes a distinct mood, painterly gesture, and individual colour scheme.

The series seems to explore the entire vocabulary of gestural expressive abstraction—from Jawlensky to Rothko, from Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock, from Germany to the USA and back to Europe.

The titles of the works indicate which painter is being portrayed: Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Johannes Itten, Francis Bacon, Imi Knoebel, or Louise Bourgeois, among others. Yet these portraits are not likenesses. They do not depict physical appearance, but rather condense the artistic essence of each painter—what is unique to their work.

Chunqing Huang probes the nature of painting itself, deciphering the DNA inherent in the works of the painters she portrays and distilling it into a single image. Based on personal memories, ideas, and inner images, these small-format works play a subtle game with the viewer. While the portraits reveal how Huang perceives these artists, they simultaneously question our own images of them. Do our perceptions align with hers? Can we guess—or even identify with certainty—who is being portrayed?

Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, author and curator of the Wiesbaden exhibition, describes the idiosyncratic nature of the series:

“It is an act of appropriation both brazen and supple… Painter’s Portrait is a work from memory; or for memory; or about the process of recollection. Chunqing Huang spends a few days remembering Manet—everything she has ever seen of him—before turning to Adolph Menzel or Max Liebermann. She does not look at what the painter sees or what drives the painter; she wields the brush as her model would have wielded it. The model is inside her… One begins to suspect that the relationship of one painting to another in the series may be more important than the name on which the particular portrait is based.”*

Chunqing Huang’s portraits are art about art—images about other images—created by an artist who, while painting, slips into the skin of another and asks: What would happen if I painted as Claude Monet, Francis Bacon, Anselm Kiefer, or Irma Stern, while always remaining myself?

The series represents both Chunqing Huang’s personal history of painting since Impressionism and an overview of the different modes of predominantly expressive abstraction.

Chunqing Huang was born in 1974 in Heze, China. She studied graphic art and painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, graduating with a bachelor’s degree, and later studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt with, among others, Wolfgang Tillmans, Peter Angermann, and Hermann Nitsch, whose master student she was. Her works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across Asia, Europe, and the USA. The series Painter’s Portrait was shown in summer 2021 in a joint exhibition at the Kunsthaus and the Museum Wiesbaden, curated by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler.

Painter’s Portrait II is accompanied by a catalogue of approximately 50 pages with colour illustrations of all exhibited works.