ARTISTS
Xie Nanxing: Eight Dreams
Petzel is pleased to present Eight Dreams, an exhibition of new paintings by Beijing-based artist Xie Nanxing, opening Thursday, April 17, 2025. The show marks Xie鈥檚 second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view through May 23, 2025, at 520 West 25th Street.
The premise is simple enough: eight paintings, all in the same format, all relating to the artist鈥檚 dreams. The paintings themselves, however, are less straightforward. Xie鈥檚 practice is underpinned by a desire to bring figurative painting into new territory, while at the same time questioning the validity of the medium. It is to this end that his dreams have been exploited, not interpreted or illustrated, as he turns to the language of the unconscious both as a challenge and for support.
鈥淢any dreams,鈥� wrote Jung, 鈥渂affle all attempts at reproduction, even immediately after waking; others can be remembered only with doubtful accuracy, and comparatively few can be called really distinct and clearly reproducible.鈥� (2) It is this fleeting, elusive quality that Xie seeks to capture. Rather than the fantastical but almost classical figuration of much surrealist painting, the viewer is confronted with an experience that is often more like trying to piece together a dream, of which only hazy memories remain.
Xie鈥檚 paintings seem both to encourage and resist interpretation. The first four paintings in the series, which form a group of sorts, all include fragments of text, however these are never entirely clear. In Exploited Dream No. 2, the viewer can see seven lines of Chinese characters. These in fact form a poem that relates to the content of the painting. However, they have been emphatically struck through, such that hardly a single word can be made out, and the one that is most visible鈥斿摟 (chi), indicating the sound of giggling, heavy breathing or something being torn鈥攊s itself deeply ambiguous. Once crossed out, these lines of text become something new: the steps on a pathway that curve up through the painting.
In the last 15 years, Xie has often used a 鈥渃anvas print鈥� technique inspired by the process of Chinese ink painting. He paints figuratively on a second unstretched canvas that has been laid on top of the work鈥檚 surface, so that when it is removed, only the traces that have seeped through are left behind. These 鈥渟hadows,鈥� as Xie sometimes calls them, are present in all but one of the paintings here. In some works they approach legibility鈥攚e can begin to read the central figures in Exploited Dream No. 2鈥攚hile in others they are more obscure. But even when they manifest as almost completely abstract, they always indicate some latent figurative content.
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Petzel is pleased to present Eight Dreams, an exhibition of new paintings by Beijing-based artist Xie Nanxing, opening Thursday, April 17, 2025. The show marks Xie鈥檚 second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view through May 23, 2025, at 520 West 25th Street.
The premise is simple enough: eight paintings, all in the same format, all relating to the artist鈥檚 dreams. The paintings themselves, however, are less straightforward. Xie鈥檚 practice is underpinned by a desire to bring figurative painting into new territory, while at the same time questioning the validity of the medium. It is to this end that his dreams have been exploited, not interpreted or illustrated, as he turns to the language of the unconscious both as a challenge and for support.
鈥淢any dreams,鈥� wrote Jung, 鈥渂affle all attempts at reproduction, even immediately after waking; others can be remembered only with doubtful accuracy, and comparatively few can be called really distinct and clearly reproducible.鈥� (2) It is this fleeting, elusive quality that Xie seeks to capture. Rather than the fantastical but almost classical figuration of much surrealist painting, the viewer is confronted with an experience that is often more like trying to piece together a dream, of which only hazy memories remain.
Xie鈥檚 paintings seem both to encourage and resist interpretation. The first four paintings in the series, which form a group of sorts, all include fragments of text, however these are never entirely clear. In Exploited Dream No. 2, the viewer can see seven lines of Chinese characters. These in fact form a poem that relates to the content of the painting. However, they have been emphatically struck through, such that hardly a single word can be made out, and the one that is most visible鈥斿摟 (chi), indicating the sound of giggling, heavy breathing or something being torn鈥攊s itself deeply ambiguous. Once crossed out, these lines of text become something new: the steps on a pathway that curve up through the painting.
In the last 15 years, Xie has often used a 鈥渃anvas print鈥� technique inspired by the process of Chinese ink painting. He paints figuratively on a second unstretched canvas that has been laid on top of the work鈥檚 surface, so that when it is removed, only the traces that have seeped through are left behind. These 鈥渟hadows,鈥� as Xie sometimes calls them, are present in all but one of the paintings here. In some works they approach legibility鈥攚e can begin to read the central figures in Exploited Dream No. 2鈥攚hile in others they are more obscure. But even when they manifest as almost completely abstract, they always indicate some latent figurative content.
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