Chen Wei: Falling Light

To kick off the 50th anniversary of Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle the rising position of Chinese artist Chen Wei and Thomas Ruff will be presented. Chen Wei was shown in Germany for the first time in 2010 by Rüdiger Schöttle, Thomas Ruff has long since been closely associated with the gallery, where he had his first solo show in 1981.

The works shown in Chen Wei’s new exhibition Falling Light unite the motifs and issues of his oeuvre of the past several years and develop them further: urban spaces devoid of people, stage-like settings with strong lighting effects, wet ground, sporadic individuals or just their hands in scenes of isolation, symbolically charged elements, like the sparkling coins. The unfinished crops up in the half-laid paving stones in Fresh Paint, while what has been and gone is expressed in Fragment through the tiled floor of a late-night bar, across which are strewn the shards of broken bottles, the remains of a party. Promise is the theme of Sharing Apartment, in which the open door and the warm light behind it evoke, in conjunction with the emptiness of the room in the foreground, an uncanny atmosphere.