Guo Jin

Private Collection, New York and London

This work is in an excellent condition overall. There are no visible condition problems with this work. It was not examined under UV light.
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Guo Jin (Lots 4-6 and 137 to 139) and his older brother Guo Wei (b. 1960, Lot 191) live in Chengdu in southwest China, where they are part of a small but lively group of painters who have been recognized internationally in recent years.  Guo Jin's work consists primarily of figurative paintings, the majority featuring young children, a subject he has painted now for more than a decade.  Despite the narrow focus of his motifs and his predominately portrait formats, his is a subject of endless fascination and a potentially wide range of expressive possibilities.  Guo Jin's interest, however, seems to be less in cataloguing the emotions of children than in capturing specific gestures or bodily configurations, leaving his captivating painterly technique to play the dominant expressive role.

Guo Jin's figures - and the objects they touch - are fleshed out in a painterly surface that is at once pasty and shimmering, roughly textured with the work of a palette knife and yet richly nuanced in its color variations.  His backgrounds, by contrast, are often monochromatic or occasionally duo-tone, which both sets off the central figure(s) and focuses the viewer on Guo Jin's technique.  Sotheby's is pleased to offer a range of this fascinating painters work that spans more than a decade of his practice and offers clues about his path of development.

The earliest works on offer (1995, Lot 138) both depict young boys in tiny chairs.  In one, a delightful, bald boy in a bright red blouse with a wide white collar beams out with a scumbled smile from his casual sideways position in a chair of darker colors.  In the other, the child is similarly positioned but without his playmate's crossed ankles and steady poise, leaning on the back of the chair towards the viewer; his hand is raised to his nose in a familiar toddler's activity, although his neat brown vest and cream-colored long-sleeve shirt attest that he, too, has been dressed for the occasion.  Guo Jin's complicated surface textures, beautiful color variations, and paired down background are already visible.  Significantly, too, while the children may be described at cute, they are convincing depictions by virtue of their ingenuousness, a persistent strand in all of the artist's work.  They portray the simple innocence of childhood with a straightforward simplicity that eschews cloying sweetness in favor of individuated character; each sitter is captured in a particular moment, happily himself within the image.

The boy holding a feather from the following year (Lot 5) introduces us to what seems a younger child given the proportions of his head in comparison to his body.  Set against a uniform bright yellow background, the child's form is rendered in such an explosion of predominantly bright colors as to defy representational logic.  And yet we see that the child seems tired, with one eye closed and his free hand rubbing the other as though he has just awakened.  The modeling of the figure within the diverse tonal range is beautiful in its coherence, illuminated as he is by a source of light from beyond the picture at lower left.  A more monumental image due to its close-range focus, this quality is emphasized also by the sharper outline of the figure against his background and the crisper attention to detail in this particular picture.

In the work dating to 1999 (Lot 6), a young girl steadies herself on a bench-like balance beam with her hands supporting the weight of her body above her, her feet forward towards the surface of the picture plane.  Ostensibly a simple study in form, the composition actually demonstrates considerable formal sophistication, not only in the contorted body of the concentrated young gymnast which fills the picture and impresses with its anatomic accuracy, but also in the strongly foreshortened bench and the complimentary line demarcating floor and wall that creates the depth within which the figure is animated.  As a fixed position, the girl's posture is implausible: her bent arms lack the tension to hold her weight and her center of gravity remains behind the bench.  And yet in Guo Jin's painting, which captures a movement in progress, the pictorial balance remains.

While hints of a more mottled and splattered painterly technique begin to arise in Guo's treatment of the young gymnast, a new application practice that is almost wash-like in appearance is powerfully in evidence in the picture of two charming young boys from 2002 (Lot 137).   One child in primarily yellows and reds supports his friend who is dressed in the cooler colors of the spectrum and dominates the space of the picture.  The forward-most figure seems to be laughing, though both appear seem to be responding to the familiar direction to 'smile for the camera.'  Unusually fluid in its melding of colors and lacking the impasto that characterized previous works, the picture is a marked departure for the artist and a playground song of pastel colors, rendered in the delightful coloratura of an aria.

In Guo Jin's most recent work, such as the beautiful little girl in a mustard sundress stretching on a bench (2006, Lot 139), the artist fluently mixes and matches the stylistic vocabularies he has developed.  More overtly representational than earlier pictures, this latter work pairs sharp outlining with areas of less conspicuous delineation, scumbled palette knife work with mottled and wash-like surface textures, and a primarily two-tone setting with streaks of more complicated coloration where planes meet.  A similar range of Guo's diverse surface techniques is evidenced in the grisaille painting of two playful, reclining girls (2006, Lot 4), the foremost of which is unusually posed stretching her legs wide towards the edges of the picture.  In his methodically progressive practice, Guo Jin has arrived at a fluid range of technical possibilities that transcends the endearing subject matter he continues to pursue.