Bird Cage, a temporary shelter:
Zhang Enli for the Galleria Borghese
Bird Cage, a temporary shelter: Zhang Enli for the Galleria Borghese
Part of the Contemporary Commissions Program
Duration: 2019 April 9 – July 7
Venue: Galleria Borghese, Rome
As part of the Contemporary Commissions program, conceived by Anna Coliva, the Galleria Borghese presents Zhang Enli’s monumental site-specific installation Bird Cage, a temporary shelter. Set in some spaces of the Museum, in the “Uccelliera” and in the adjacent “Giardino segreto di Tramontana”, the project is curated by Geraldine Leardi and Davide Quadrio.
Shanghai-based artist, Zhang Enli (b. Jilin, China, 1965), reflects on the relationship between architecture and art, in particular on the special relationship between the Galleria Borghese and the adjacent secret garden. Playing with transpositions, historical echoes, and hybridism, Zhang Enli creates four symbolic structures to reveal unexpected narratives. Playing between the complexity of historical strata and the equally layered reality of the present, Zhang evokes tales from distant lands and admixtures.
The two structures inside the Uccelliera recall columns, towers, and religious architecture encountered along the Silk Road (Greek columns, municipal towers, Persian palaces, and minarets in Samarkand). Painting on these architectural elements, the artist generates abstract suggestions through the use of light, colors, and surfaces, which in turn refer to the Galleria Borghese and its chromatic universe. The external structure, instead, plays with the concept of a “third landscape”: a painted version of nature that stands right next to the real one. The painter appropriates an uninhabited space and transforms it in the most primary architectural module, a cube, that the public can enter and interact with in an immersive way.
Lastly, the Camouflage Balls placed in the Porch, Zhang Enli reflects on the Galleria Borghese as a place of sculpture; the choice of being located in a transit area, in an inside/out, stitches up the very meaning of his overall intervention.
The sophisticated and nuanced references in Zhang Enli’s installation sum up the work the artist has been producing in the past few years, operating beyond bi-dimensional painting practices and experimenting with space. By means of deformations and reflections, Zhang Enli produces chromatic effects, lights and shadows, abstractions and organic forms, inspired by the colors and compositions of artworks from the Galleria Borghese’s collection; references in his work include masterpieces by Titian, Bellini, Caravaggio, and Bernini.
With this project conceived for the Galleria Borghese, Zhang Enli continues his exploration of poor materials. In a process of abstraction and sublimation achieved through his pictorial and artistic gestures, humble media such as cardboard, wood, and adhesive tape become artistic components. Their use is at the same time a tribute to artistic forms that have stirred global resonance – in particular, Arte Povera – and the creative base on which the artist paints, inspired by, in this case, the decorated surfaces of the Galleria Borghese and the Uccelliera.
About Contemporary Commission
Committenze Contemporanee at the Galleria Borghese
Anna Coliva
The Galleria Borghese is a museum that houses collections of ancient sculpture and art from the Renaissance, Baroque and up to the neo-classical period, and stands in the midst of a park that was created along with the building to form a single and magnificent complex. The Museum is looked upon as something of an exception, even in comparison with other historical residences of the highest standing, above all by virtue of the integrity with which it has conserved the original character, one conferred to it thanks to the extraordinary love for art of its founder, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577–1633), nephew of Pope Paul V and a powerful and extremely rich art patron and collector.
By virtue of the quality, importance and uniqueness of its works, the Borghese collection is considered among the most beautiful in the world. Its exceptionality undoubtedly also lies in the fact that it was assembled at the will of a single collector: Cardinal Scipione, meaning that the park, the building and the works it houses all form a sumptuous whole, coherent and unique. Even the extraordinary decorations of the building, its marbles, frescoes, friezes and mosaics were all designed with a view to the works that were to be brought together there.
A historical collection with these characteristics, apparently insular in its coherence and the pertinence to the will of its founder, might seem destined to a state of immobility. This consideration and the need to go beyond it led to the establishment of the project Committenze Contemporanee in 2007, which today hosts Bird Cage, a temporary shelter by the Chinese artist Zhang Enli, and which has also presented other site-specific works in the past by other high calibre figures from the contemporary art world such as Giulio Paolini, Georg Baselitz, Hans Op de Beck, Candida Höfer, Matt Collishaw and Vedovamazzei.
The programme is based on a reflection that aims to reconcile the mission of a contemporary art museum – which must serve, expose and promote contemporary artistic creations – with that of a museum of ancient art such as the Galleria Borghese, which on the contrary draws on contemporary art to better understand its own identity in the present, thus exploiting it as a fundamental and essential means by which to gain such comprehension.
Through contemporary art, the Galleria Borghese gets to know itself and understand its own time. The artists are called upon to produce site-specific projects, measuring up to the complexity of this place, and the inventions deriving from such a stimulus yield something highly yet subtly original: unobtainable with the sole means of historiographical logic. They provoke something akin to a rekindling of Borghese’s own collection, which after the death of Cardinal Scipione never entirely stopped growing. Ideally, the Committenze Contemporanee project allows that collecting tradition to be reactivated, taking on new meanings, with the merit of doing so as part of the modern state of the Museum while also grasping its contemporary specificities, and the works produced today are therefore original inventions, works of their own era. The independent thought of the artists is respected, for art cannot comply to diktats or conditioning but only provocations – and a museum of ancient art like the Galleria Borghese may be such a provocation to the highest degree – with a view to ensuring that the relationship with ancient art is free and fertile, and aside from any sense of comparison and competition, an authentic act of creation.
About the artist
For Zhang Enli, painting—whether his brushes are illustrating human activity oreveryday objects—isa vital activity.
As an artist who focuses on some of the more prosaic elements in daily life, Zhang devotes the same amount of passionate attention to every object, be it a bucket, a wardrobe or a person. Each painting is not only a representation, but an expression as well. His signature expressive lines and curves are influenced by traditional Chinese brush technique, but are always underpinned by the structure of pencil-drawn grids. Immersed in the inherent space of his canvas, painted objects seem on the verge of dissolving into the thin layers of paint.
In the ongoing series Space Paintings, Zhang focuses on the language of painting and applies gouache directly to the walls, creating an immersive and nostalgic environment. Removed objects are implied only by the traces they have left within the space, encouraging the viewer to visualize and reflect on the underlying metaphors of “presence” and “absence.”
Zhang Enli was born in Jilin province in 1965. He graduated from the art and design institute of Wuxi Technical University in 1989 and currently lives in Shanghai. The artist has held solo exhibitions at numerous prestigious institutions and galleries worldwide, including Galleria Borghese, Rome (forthcoming in 2019); chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai (2019); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018); Hauser & Wirth, New York (2018); Firstsite, Colchester (2017); ShanghART, Shanghai (2015); Hauser & Wirth, London (2014); K11 Art Foundation, HongKong (2014); Villa Croce, Genoa (2013); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2013); Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai (2011); and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2009), a presentation which later travelled to Kunsthalle Bern, Berne, among others.
Zhang Enli’s work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); the Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama (2014); Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham (2013); Kochi-Muziris, Kochi (2012); the First Chinese Oil Painting Biennial, Curitiba (2011); the Eighth Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2010); the 7th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2008); and Villa Manin- Centre for Contemporary Art Passariano, Italy (2006), among others.
About The Galleria Borghese
The Galleria Borghese is an art gallery in Rome, Italy, housed in the Villa Borghese Pinciana. The Galleria Borghese houses a substantial part of the Borghese collection of Roman sculptures, old masters. It includes major collections of Bernini, Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian, etc.
For more information about the exhibition, please click here.
