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Lot 1379 FROM A PROMINENT ASIAN COLLECTION (LOT 1379)
Viewing the Waterfall seamlessly integrates Zhang’s accomplished landscape painting with the emotive impact of his splashed colours. Painted in 1963 in Zhang’s tropical retreat outside São Paolo, the Garden of Eight Virtues, it is one of the finest works of the artist’s South American period. Dense, dark ink and deep-blues fill the lower register of the painting. We then emerge into a scene of scholars gazing at a distant waterfall, before ascending through dilute washes coloured mist from the mountain torrent. Above the waterfall the landscape is absorbed into a radiant surface of blue and green. The brightness of this middle section is eloquently balanced with the darkness of the ink-saturated field of blue pigment below. In this near luminous space only the feintest hint of the underlying landscape is visible. Zhang’s formal description dissolves into powerful abstraction. Finally, we arrive upon a distant mountain peak, with a solitary temple emerging from the splashed fields of colour. This transition between expressive colour and legible landscape characterises Zhang’s synthesis of his classical training with global artistic trends.
Zhang’s was particularly invested in Viewing the Waterfall, which so deftly balances abstraction and description. When he relocated from Brazil to California in 1968, Viewing the Waterfall came with him, hanging in pride of place in Zhang’s Huanbi’an studio in Pebble beach.
Viewing the Waterfall seamlessly integrates Zhang’s accomplished landscape painting with the emotive impact of his splashed colours. Painted in 1963 in Zhang’s tropical retreat outside São Paolo, the Garden of Eight Virtues, it is one of the finest works of the artist’s South American period. Dense, dark ink and deep-blues fill the lower register of the painting. We then emerge into a scene of scholars gazing at a distant waterfall, before ascending through dilute washes coloured mist from the mountain torrent. Above the waterfall the landscape is absorbed into a radiant surface of blue and green. The brightness of this middle section is eloquently balanced with the darkness of the ink-saturated field of blue pigment below. In this near luminous space only the feintest hint of the underlying landscape is visible. Zhang’s formal description dissolves into powerful abstraction. Finally, we arrive upon a distant mountain peak, with a solitary temple emerging from the splashed fields of colour. This transition between expressive colour and legible landscape characterises Zhang’s synthesis of his classical training with global artistic trends.
Zhang’s was particularly invested in Viewing the Waterfall, which so deftly balances abstraction and description. When he relocated from Brazil to California in 1968, Viewing the Waterfall came with him, hanging in pride of place in Zhang’s Huanbi’an studio in Pebble beach.
ZHANG DAQIAN (1899-1983)
Viewing the Waterfall
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Price Realised
HKD 64,225,000