Exhibition from July 5 to August 3, 2019
Opening on Thursday July 4, from 6 to 10 pm
Rue des Bains 61, 1205 Geneva
Galerie Xippas is pleased to present an exhibition by artist Thomas Liu Le Lann. For his first exhibition at Galerie Xippas, he will present a collection of sculptures and paintings created especially for this occasion.
The title, Ziwen, you deserve all the flowers that still grow on earth, resonates like an intimate poem from the artist to his fiancé, for which the entire exhibition is dedicated to. This sentence, proclaimed like a declaration of love, also has a catastrophic dimension and states the arrival of a disaster. Love and urgency, beauty and catastrophe, this exhibition is a portrait of the artist’s loving relationship with Ziwen, a representation of their common life.
In the first exhibition room, there are four glass sculptures: a rabbit called ZIWEN, smaller sculptures TOYS and SEMISOFT and a chainsaw called VRAOURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!! These four sculptures were made in collaboration with the glassblower Vincent Breed. The exhibition also present three large paintings composed of eight panels of vinyl fabrics and painted flowers called BOUQUET 1, BOUQUET 2 and BOUQUET 3.
The second exhibition room features a large «soft sculpture» called THOMAS that fills the entire space. This sculpture is in the same line as his previous creations achieved over the last three years. Thomas Liu Le Lann focuses on the elaboration of finely crafted fictions, directly inspired from the popular culture. In this way, he creates these «soft sculptures» installed on the ground, characters without faces or expressions, whose only visible attitude seems to have given up on the world around them. These gigantic characters are soft, sometimes bordering on formless, like overwhelmed and weary modern superheroes.
Thomas Liu Le Lann is a French artist born in 1994, he lives and works in Geneva. In 2018, he won the HEAD – Gallery Award. By awarding this prize, Galerie Xippas offers him the opportunity to present his work in an exhibition open to the public within its spaces in Geneva. That same year, he won the New Heads Award – BNP Art Awards Foundation, which allowed him to present a solo show at Musée des Beaux Arts du Locle and on the BNP Foundation’s booth at artgenève. Among his solo exhibitions, let’s mention Show Down at Musée des Beaux Arts du Locle (Le Locle, Switzerland), I’m not okay at Galerie Vin Vin (Vienne, Austria) and 19.07 at La Maladie d’Amour (Grenoble, France). He has participated in group shows, such as Henry Darger Summer Camp designed by Extramentale (Arles, France) and Plattform#19 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain – Yverdon les Bains (Yverdon les Bains, Switzerland).
