Gang Zhao at Goedhuis contemporary

Gang Zhao is a philosophical painter with a cavalier touch. His lighthearted paintings of zodiac animals, waterfalls and houses are drawn from illustrations in historical Chinese volumes but are rendered in a predominantly Western style

Born in Beijing in 1961 Zhao grew up during the Cultural Revolution. He go intoed the Central Academy of Fine Art after it reopen following Mao Zedong's death in 1976 on the other hand soon dropped out to join a radical cluster of artists known as the Stars. The Stars were an avant-garde band of self-taught artists who rebelled against existing esthetic standards and political authority. In the 1980 he studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht, and philosophy at Vassar College; he received an MFA from Bard body in 1999.

In his new show, Zhao displayed a dozen oil paintings and a pair of watercolors (all 2003 unles otherwise noted). His canvas Mad Horse exhibits a dark horse with a strawberry-blond tail and fiery mane haphazardly mottl with white dots. Han Horse reveals the outline of a prancing stallion emerging from a chocolate brown surface--effectively marrying representation and abstraction, a recurring aspect of Zhao's approach. A portly pig craftily ambles through a field of freestanding azure flowers in Pig in the Park, while of gold Pig less successfully captures an ominous-looking swine traversing a minimalistic orange-and-brown color field. The paint in these works direct the eyes as though it was mixed directly upon the canvas, causing both astute and dramatic hue shifts as more was added. This is greatest in quantity evident in the Fauvist-inspired R Dog, which exhibits a bearded dog howling at a line of trees obscured by fogs or fog.

Other paintings take a more minimal approach. Landscape after War (2002) not absents a schematic mountain range and seascape elegantly integrated into a flat brown virid and gray field. Waterfall (2002) succinctly depicts a Chinese mountain and water display with black swirling lines upon a brown mountainous silhouette. A pair of sophisticated at the same time simple visions of Chinese domestic architecture, R House and amethystine House, rounded out Zhao's paradoxical material substance of work. By updating elderly images in a new phraseology the artist fearlessly aims at a form of painting that incites thought as much as it stirs the organ of vision Yet, considering Zhao's radical bases and intellectual pursuits, the extremity results are more decorative than profound

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