Exhibition in Art gallery | Xu und Partner

Location: China, Hangzhou

Area: 1470 sqm

Year: 2018

Client: Art gallery of China Academy of Art,

Architect: xup  Architekten

Team: Shan Xu, Zhihu Pan, Jing Xue, Xinxin Ji

Type: interior design

The exhibition installation was customized for a joint exhibition of two painters. The concept “house in house” was in order to stimulate the audience to peek and explore the artworks, and also matches the theme of the curation - ​​“discovery”.

Two halls of the art gallery - one square, the other oval, were distributed respectively to works of the two painters. In the square hall, a large number of small drafts of the painter were exhibited for the first time. These small drafts were confined to a small cube located in the center of the hall, while the outside surface of the cube was blank white, the sculptural volume of the cube allowed the entrance of the visitor only by its narrow apertures. The large scale of the exhibition hall and the small scale of the square box correspond respectively to different distances required for viewing large paintings and small drafts. Inside the cube, the intensive layout of the drafts created a stunning visual impact, showing the vigorous intermediate working process of the painter, which could be unfamiliar to the general public.

In the oval hall, illustrated manuscripts of the painter were revealed to the public, again, for the first time. All these manuscripts were arranged in a linear space in the center of the hall. The S-shaped wall panels avoid the overview of the whole space. The extreme length and width proportion of the space with an endless matrix of illustrated manuscripts on the entire wall, put on stage the untiring seek during the artistic creation and the atmosphere of an introspective working state.