Yan Pei-Ming
Painting Histories

From 7 July to 3 September 2023, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Yan Pei-Ming. Painting Histories, the largest exhibition ever devoted to the Franco-Chinese artist in Italy. The exhibition is part of the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art project, developed in partnership with the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati. Curated by Arturo Galansino, ‘Yan Pei-Ming, Painting Histories’ will explore the artist’s powerful and highly original research into the relationship between image and reality through painted depictions of his personal life alongside important moments, figures and icons from our collective history.

It will feature over 30 works, several of which have been created especially for the exhibition, including two TIME magazine covers portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2008 and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2023. Making direct links with Italy, the exhibition will also showcase a trilogy of new paintings based on famous photographs documenting dramatic moments in Italian’s recent political history: the discovery of Aldo Moro’s body in the boot of a car in Rome in 1978; the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Idroscalo in Ostia in 1975; and the bodies of Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci hanging upside-down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto in 1945. The exhibition alternates these emblematic images with monumental self-portraits and portraits of his mother and father or historical figures such as Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler, along with original interpretations of such canonical artworks as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Velazquez’s Innocent X.

Renowned for his deep and passionate reflection on painting in today’s art, Yan Pei-Ming urges us to rethink the relationship between history and the contemporary world, between memory and the present. Exploring such genres as portraiture, landscapes, still lives and historical painting, his pictures take their cue from the model of photographic images from different sources such as the artist’s own personal archive, magazine covers, film stills or celebrated works from art history. Yan Pei-Ming urges us to reflect on the contradiction between reality and depiction, truth and the construction of images – an increasingly topical theme in the digital age where boundaries between private and public, past and present and the reliability of authorship are increasingly blurred.

Yan Pei-Ming is a painter of history and of stories, revisiting iconic moments from the past but also exploring personal histories and bringing an immediacy and human touch to images that have become ubiquitous through their reproduction. As he himself puts it: “I am not a romantic painter, I am a painter of our time.” In portraying himself or his family, or celebrated figures or moments in history, Yan Pei-Ming extols a direct, almost brutal relationship with his models through a style based on vigorous, broad brushstrokes applied directly onto the canvas without any preparatory drawing. He attacks the canvas with immense energy, almost coming to blows with the paint.