JIA YOUFU (BORN 1942)

PROPERTY OF A COLLECTOR, ACQUIRED DIRECTLY FROM JIA YOUFU
Jia Youfu studied landscape painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing from 1960-1965. He returned to the Academy in 1977, where he has continued to teach traditional painting to future generations of artists. The current owner of these works met Jia Youfu when she was a graduate student at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing in the late 1980s. She developed a personal relationship with Jia, collecting his works through the years and eventually organizing solo exhibitions of Jia's paintings for M. Sutherland Fine Arts, her New York gallery.
As these paintings beautifully demonstrate, Jia Youfu combines inspirations from nature, the distant past and modern tradition, all blended and made unique by his own talent. His sheer cliffs and rocky surfaces are based on the dramatic scenery of the northern Taihang Mountains in Henan, Hebei and Shanxi, where Jia has traveled numerous times. The grand scale and awe-inspiring mood of his compositions bring the Northern Song monumental landscape tradition into the 21st century. Similarly, the influence of one of his teachers, Li Keran, is visible Jia's effective use of dark ink and emphasis on dramatic verticals.