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Liu Ye Book Painting No. 22 (Karl Blossfeldt, Wunder in der Natur, H. Schmidt & C. Günther, Leipzig, 1942, Page 49), 2019
Acrylic on canvas
32,5 x 24 cm (12 3/4 x 9 1/2 in) (unframed)
34,5 x 25,5 x 4 cm (13 5/8 x 10 1/8 x 1 5/8 in) (framed)
34,5 x 25,5 x 4 cm (13 5/8 x 10 1/8 x 1 5/8 in) (framed)
Book Painting Nr 22 depicts book pages painted after Karl Blossfeldt’s highly influential photographs of plants. Characteristic of Liu Ye’s book paintings, it is both the haunting images of enlarged flowers by the avantgarde photographer and the beautifully printed photogravure edition from 1942 that we discover. Apart from image and publication, the painting resonates with the lasting influence of Blossfeldt’s endeavor, both in context of surrealist art theory (the relationship between organic and human-made forms), and the subsequent entanglement of art and science, decisive for much artistic practice in the 1950s and 1960s.
The representation of the enlarged Blossfeldt image in a modest, intimate scale of Liu Ye’s canvases, departs from many of the artist’s other book paintings in picturing the pages as image: both identified as pages of a book solely by the small page number on the lower right corner and oriented “correctly”. Most of the artist’s book paintings locate the “reader” across from the painting’s spectator, in an imaginary space “on the other side”.
The representation of the enlarged Blossfeldt image in a modest, intimate scale of Liu Ye’s canvases, departs from many of the artist’s other book paintings in picturing the pages as image: both identified as pages of a book solely by the small page number on the lower right corner and oriented “correctly”. Most of the artist’s book paintings locate the “reader” across from the painting’s spectator, in an imaginary space “on the other side”.
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