Métamorphoses

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present Chinese artist Wang Keping’s work, at its rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré location for the first time. He had previously been the subject of two solo exhibitions, in Paris and Brussels, in 2018.

Concurrently, Flammarion editions will publish an important monograph about Wang Keping. In this volume, curator Virginie Perdrisot-Cassan and artist Ai Weiwei retrace the artistic journey of an artist who was, in 1979, a founding member of the “Stars” movement, before becoming the author of a body of work that is considered today to be a major contribution to contemporary sculpture.

Metamorphoses, Wang Keping’s site-specific exhibition, unveils the artist’s most recent body of work: a group of eight majestic, fire-patinated cypress-wood sculptures. This never-before-seen corpus is the product of three years of work, marking a creative renewal in the life of the 73-year-old sculptor, since moving to his Vendée studio in the spring of 2019.

Located between the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean and the national forest of Longeville, an old naval warehouse has been transformed into a creative hearth, allowing Wang Keping to work on a new scale and to carve his sculptures out of very large logs – century-old cypress and oak trees – in a hand-to-hand struggle, where human manipulation is measured up against the power of nature.