▣ About the Exhibition

BRIDGING ASIA—EUROPE III

Curated by Lorand Hegyi

November 2, 2019

The Parkview Museum Beijing is pleased to announce the opening of the contemporary art exhibition “Bridging Asia—Europe III.” The exhibition, curated by The Parkview Museum Art Director Lorand Hegyi, presents four artists from different countries in Asia and Europe: Ling Jian (China), Milenko Prvacki (Singapore), Hubert Scheibl (Austria) and Giuseppe Gallo (Italy).

The exhibition is the third of a series launched by The Parkview Museum in 2017. As suggested by the title Bridging Asia—Europe, this series of contemporary art exhibitions aims to establish a cultural bridge between countries of the East and the West through the creation of a dialogue between artists within a global and multicultural perspective.

The four artists presented in this show, while elaborating different linguistic systems during the last two to three decades, all display a common tendency to question the narrative potential of contemporary painting.  They shed light on the authentic narratives based on the multiplicity of readings and interpretations: by acknowledging the existence of parallel readings and of contextual determination of semantic structure in the work of art, they critically challenge the reductive and exclusive conception of a monolithic formal system.

While Milenko Prvacki and Giuseppe Gallo operate with a complex and multifaceted visual vocabulary characterized by historical and cultural references, the painting of Hubert Scheibl reveals an emotional and empathic aura where certain strange, alien elements and unexpected happenings create disturbing effects while undermining the harmonious coherence.  Ling Jian’s quasi-encyclopedic approach to the representation of its subject matter displays similarities with Giuseppe Gallo’s eclectic Neo-Mannerism; Hubert Scheibl’s gestural abstraction and Milenko Prvacki’s non-representational, non-figurative, non-descriptive, non-mimetic painterly language seem to function continually within the frames of so-called abstract art, regardless of the different aesthetic definitions of historical abstraction.

Through their voices, the artists not only express personal feelings and subjective experiences but also reveal basic existential questions, human orientations and the tendency to pursue authenticity, essentiality, significance. As the English artists Gilbert & George once formulated, artistic creation isolates and alienates the artist from the non-artistic surrounding, and makes the artist “stranger,” deviant, mad and even “dangerous” for the status quo. At the same time, the artists are deeply involved in the

complex socio-cultural context and participate in its multilayered structures: engagement and responsibility are inseparably connected with subversive questioning of relevant narratives of our epoch.

The third edition of the exhibition series “Bridging Asia—Europe” offers a deeply human, intimate, substantial, complex and poetic vision about the human condition without pathos and romanticism, but with a questioning character, with an engagement for revealing contradictions and discrepancies between different messages, communication systems, visual and textual information.

The highly sophisticated visual organization of the painterly structure as well as the extremely fine colorism and the intensive sensuality of the presented works by these four artists make this exhibition enjoyable and interrogating at the same time.