In February, Katrine Levin Galleries present Reflections in a Blue Lake: Reduction Woodblock Prints by Chen Li at the Coningsby Gallery in Fitzrovia from the 19th to the 24th of February.
Chen Li lives and works in Kunming, the capital of China’s spectacular Yunnan Province. Born into an artistic family in 1971, he grew up surrounded by the avant-garde artists of the post-Cultural Revolution, equally inspired by the works of Bruegel and de Kooning as of Guan Xiu and Zhao Wu-ji.
Last year, Katrine Levin Galleries introduced Chen Li’s lyrical paintings in his first London exhibition, “Paintings from the Heart”. This time, we shine the spotlight on Chen Li’s extraordinary woodblock prints, made using a rare reduction woodblock technique developed in Yunnan.
The “reduction” woodblock printing technique involves stamping all of the colours from a single woodblock. Each step along the way destroys the previous one until the woodblock itself is destroyed.
