PING ZHENG
Reflection
January 7 - February 17

The gallery is delighted to present Chinese-born, Brooklyn-based artist Ping Zheng’s third solo exhibition at the gallery of paintings on paper in oil stick. The exhibition will include fourteen new paintings installed within the two main rooms of the gallery. A full-color catalogue with an essay by Barbara Pollack is forthcoming.

Drawing from a vast reserve of personal energy and memories of childhood joy in the wild natural landscape of northern and southern China, Zheng's works feature elements of nature that recur in her mind’s eye.  These motifs include the form of a mountain's peak, suns and moons reflecting in bodies of water, and skies--both day and night--that appear to reverberate and spiral.  With a bold use of color and shape, and a compressed sense of spatiality, each painted scene confronts the viewer in a direct, frontal way.  This sense of immediacy is important to Zheng, who wants the viewer to feel inspired to open up his or her imagination when looking at the works. As Barbara Pollack writes in her catalogue essay for the exhibition,

This contradiction between innocence and awakening is everywhere in Zheng’s work, heightened by her choice of oil stick as her primary medium, a break from oil painting that convincingly evokes the simple chaos of crayons in a kindergarten.  Her technique is flawless yet the artist’s goal is not just to achieve perfection, but to convey a state of liberation in the viewer.

While studying at RISD in 2015, Zheng began to use oil sticks to create her works. She has since continued to use this medium because it enables her to apply color directly to the paper by hand without using the mediating tool of a brush. In recent years, Zheng has traveled frequently, attending artist residencies in the United Kingdom, China, Vermont, Arizona, and Spain. The portability of oil sticks and paper allow her to easily move through different locations. Absorbing the outdoor landscapes of each place, new experiences find a place among earlier memories in her recent works. Suns and moons serve as continuous points of reference and as symbols of meditation and self-reflection.

Ping Zheng was born in was born in 1989 in Zhejiang, China and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  She received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and a BFA in painting from the University College of London, Slade School of Fine Art in 2014.  Her works have been exhibited at Kristen Lorello, New York, NY, McClain Gallery, Houston, TX, and Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY.  Her works are included in the collections of the Cleveland Clinic Art Program and JP Morgan Chase Bank, among others.  For further information, please contact the gallery.