VIEWING ROOMS NAME WILL BE HERE

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Adverb High Command, Xie Nanxing’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first solo show in New York, on view from May 6 until June 25. Nanxing will present two recent bodies of work—The Dwarfs’ Refrain (2019–2020) and Shadows of Painting (2020–2021)—introducing an expansive and demanding practice that has constantly evolved since his work was first presented internationally at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. Xie Nanxing has written recently of his admiration for Georges Didi-Huberman’s What we see looks back at us (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde). The book opens with a discussion of “the ineluctable scission of the act of seeing (l’inéluctable scission du voir),” drawing on a famous passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Ruth Noack, who included Nanxing’s work when curating documenta 12 in 2007, used a similar phrase to describe his paintings, suggesting that they provoked a “crisis of spectatorship.” This might be the only serious initial response, for Nanxing’s paintings are full of frictions and contradictions that the viewer must navigate—between figuration and abstraction, between painterliness and conceptual de-materialization, between ironic detachment and existential longing.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Adverb High Command, Xie Nanxing’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first solo show in New York, on view from May 6 until June 25. Nanxing will present two recent bodies of work—The Dwarfs’ Refrain (2019–2020) and Shadows of Painting (2020–2021)—introducing an expansive and demanding practice that has constantly evolved since his work was first presented internationally at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999.

Xie Nanxing has written recently of his admiration for Georges Didi-Huberman’s What we see looks back at us (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde). The book opens with a discussion of “the ineluctable scission of the act of seeing (l’inéluctable scission du voir),” drawing on a famous passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Ruth Noack, who included Nanxing’s work when curating documenta 12 in 2007, used a similar phrase to describe his paintings, suggesting that they provoked a “crisis of spectatorship.” This might be the only serious initial response, for Nanxing’s paintings are full of frictions and contradictions that the viewer must navigate—between figuration and abstraction, between painterliness and conceptual de-materialization, between ironic detachment and existential longing.