18 Gallery is proud to host famous Zhang Dali solo show. Zhang strated working in portraiture as one of Beijing's first graffiti artist, spraying and carving head into the walls of buildings schedules for destruction.
For his first exhibition at the 18Gallery, Zhang Dali presents a very intense project. Gigantic painted portraits facing up the visitor as soon as he comes into the show.
Press preview on Monday February 1st, 2010, from 4 to 6 pm.
18Gallery : 18 Zhongshan East Road (E1), 4F, Shanghai
Opening : Tuesday February 2nd, 2010 from 6 to 9PM
Venue: 18Gallery, 18 Zhongshan East Road (E1), 4F, Shanghai
18Gallery is proud to host famous Zhang Dali solo show with a very intense project (born in 1963 in Harbin, China and based in Beijing). As the visitor comes into the show he is facing Zhang Dali's gigantic, almost four meters high, painted portraits.
When asked why AK-47 written all over the paintings. One will discover that this was Zhang Dali's tag back in the days. « It comes from a gang's name. I use this to stand for the violence. This sort of violence doesn't just mean one person hits another person. »
Zhang Dali's work actively engages with the rapidly changing environment in China. Zhang started working in portraiture as one of Beijing's first graffiti artists, spraying and carving heads into the walls of the hundreds of buildings scheduled for destruction. Working across a wide variety of media - from urban art, to archiving photographs of Mao, and large scale installations - Zhang's portraits document a contemporary social history of a culture in radical development and flux.
Zhang trained at the Beijing Central Academy of Art & Design. After studying painting in China, he went to Italy, where he discovered graffiti art. He was the only graffiti artist in Beijing throughout the early 1990s, and is the first artist since Keith Haring and Jackson Pollock to be given the cover of Time magazine.
From 1995 to 1998 he spray-painted over 2000 giant profiles of his own bald head on buildings throughout Beijing, placing the images alongside 'chai' characters painted by the city authorities to indicate that a building is scheduled for demolition. The appearance of these images became the subject of media debate in Beijing in 1998.
He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including the International Center for Photography in New York, Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo and the 2006 Gwangju Biennale in Korea. He is represented by Kiang Gallery in Atlanta, Eli Klein Fine Art in New York and Base Gallery in Tokyo.
