The Wiesbaden Kunsthaus is currently showing a series of paintings by the Frankfurt-based Chinese artist Chunqing Huang called "Painter's Portrait". They are abstract compositions, moved by energetic brushstrokes, which evoke Western artist figures in the form of their painterly signature through their choice of color, texture and lines. Anyone entering the art gallery can identify some of them from afar. The black-framed shapes in unmixed orange, yellow and blue are immediately revealed as a homage to Marianne von Werefkin, the rectangular bands hatched in glowing purple tones on brown are unmistakably inspired by Marc Rothko, and the streaky vertical stripes, from which skin-colored tadpole-like figures emerge like a concentrate of Edvard Munch's painterly thinking.But in most of the pictures that have been taken over the past five years, the "portrayed" cannot really be made out, with the yellow-green ball of lines, at best, graphically structured contours are reminiscent of Max Ernst, and the pastose green thicket draws an extremely distant sum of the Jungle Worlds by Henri Rousseau.

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the features section.

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Her depersonalizing distant view of Western art is also what makes the work of Chunqing Huang, who, born in 1974 in Heze, east China, came to Germany around the turn of the millennium after studying at the Beijing Art Academy to continue studying at the Städelschule. Her training in her home country also included training in calligraphy, which requires a special posture and breathing technique in order to make the characters independent in their visual form. The artistic impetus of Chunqing Huang seems to be rooted in writing motor skills, who fixes individually characteristic movement figures, energy lines, rhythm structures in abstract expression. With the project "Painter's Portrait" she processes her impressions of classical, modern and postmodern artists of the West,with which she became acquainted while traveling around Europe and the United States. Her portraits extrapolate how their artist models would have wielded the brush, translated into their own visual language.

The portrait character of the roughly fifty works is underlined by their comparatively small and - with a few exceptions - vertical formats. The cultural form allows them to be read as depictions of faces. In fact, in some of the painting gestures cluster together like a nerve center, for example in Adolph Menzel's appropriation, which is permeated by earth and blood tones. Admittedly, most of them resemble color landscapes made up of impasto dancing surfaces (Matisse) or glowing plants (Schlemmer). What is most immediately apparent is the proximity of the portraits of Chunqing Huang to Alexej von Jawlensky, in particular to his late abstract heads, which, combining suprematist symbolism with iconic aesthetics, visibly visualize the unrepresentable. All the happier that the curators of this project included five portraits,including the orange-black-blue-beige fleckerl carpet "Jawlensky" by Chunqing Huang, integrated into the permanent exhibition of the Wiesbaden Museum, where the Russian-born artist spent the last phase of his life, which is why a whole series of his non-faces in the immediate vicinity of the Chinese Consumption of objects already pre-exercised.

Painter's portrait

. In the Kunsthaus, Wiesbaden; until August 22nd, the intervention in the Museum Wiesbaden until August 29th. The beautiful catalog book costs 20 euros.