Beginning in the 1960s, Zhao Dajun (1937-2023) embarked on a painting practice he named “my modernism”. The career of Zhao, whose life spanned several eras, evolved in the context of a clash with the artistic reality around him and the realist tradition in China since the mid-20th century. His lifelong commitment to a reflective creative method offers a crucial narrative for understanding the development of modernism in China and its historical momentum. Under the title of “Geometry”, a concept being rich in both visual and intellectual implications, this exhibition seeks to delineate some key insights within the works of this influential, yet often overlooked, pioneer of Chinese modern and contemporary art. It aims to evaluate his creations within the context of the dynamic interplay between the immediate of the here and now and the transcendent. In this exhibition are several drawings that have been stowed away for decades and never displayed in public. Using two of these drawings, Herakles (1978) and Portrait of Lu Xun (1978), as a starting point, the exhibition presents two intertwined threads in Zhao’s painting practice.
