Ma Kelu

Ma Kelu - As part of the program dedicated to dialogue between architecture and contemporary art

For his first exhibition in France, Ma Kelu's paintings are presented within the gallery of mural paintings at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine.

Ma Kelu, born in Shanghai in 1954, belongs to a generation of artists who, from the 1970s, have operated at the margins of the official frameworks. A founding member of the No Name group, he settled in New York at the end of the 1980s, where his understanding of action painting and color field led him toward a gestural, atmospheric, and pared-down abstraction.

Presented on the same plane as the medieval frescoes and their architectural setting, Ma Kelu's painting resonates, in form and content, with the religious figures that float on uniform skies.

In Ma Kelu's work, the motifs are like clouds shaped by the wind and figures defying gravity. The shapes of his paintings primarily render the passage of time perceptible, as in Judith Reigl or Hans Hartung.

While it immediately evokes the floating universe of late Monet and the frontal stance of Matisse, Ma Kelu's abstract writing resists analysis. His universe, sometimes dark, sometimes luminous, remains unstable and teeming. Peopled with signs, it becomes, for the duration of observation, an immersive sky in which our gaze threads its way through the filaments of paint.

In the manner of the medieval frescoes of the gallery of mural paintings at the Cité, Ma Kelu invites us to experience visual chaos. Within each work, but also from one painting to the next, repetition defines a playing field where each form finds its singularity in movement. The choice of monochrome or, more rarely, bichrome emphasizes the repeated and modulated gesture, which functions as the agent of metamorphosis.

Ma Kelu's works today are in the collections of institutions and museums such as Tate Modern, Guangdong Art Museum, M+ Art Museum, and the National Museum of China. With the support of the François Cheng Endowment Fund.