Gao Brothers 高氏兄弟
Collected by worldwide prestigious museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Saatchi Gallery in London, the China National Museum in Beijing and the Moma in San Francisco, Beijing-based artists the Gao Brothers have steadily accrued notoriety since the mid-1980s, largely thanks to a wide range of artworks and projects of a political nature and humanitarian stance. Their art, associated with Joseph Beuys' notion of "social sculpture", is a metaphor of political and collective memories and is also centred around intimate and individual themes, resulting in what art critic Bérénice Angremy defines as an "allegory of human emotions".
Their wide body of work incorporates oil paintings, sculptures, performance, installations and photography.
By exploring the potential of photography, in their recent series of works the Gao Brothers create visions that hint at the natural world, the qualities of light and shadow, the infinitude of space, as well as expressing their concern for environmental issues and their desire to reconnect to nature in its purest form. There is a sense of transformation and repetition running through the images, an artistic visualisation of the spontaneous continuity conveyed by director Kim Ki-duk in his renowned film "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring". In these photographs cyclic patterns evoke the rhythm of nature, reflecting its tension between the areas of colour and the sketchy lines. Reminiscent of Gerard Richter's modulated brushstrokes of dark greens and browns, the Gao Brothers's creations filter the external and re-elaborate it through a personal and non-descriptive language, alluding to the evocative possibilities of painterly abstraction in photography.
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