Galleries in Paris

Marussa Gravagnuolo and Christine Lahoud will present, in the two spaces of the gallery at rue Jacques Callot and rue Mazarine, the new artworks of Ma Dan. The exhibition at Pièce Unique gallery is the first solo show in Europe for the Chinese and promising young artist

MA DAN is an emerging Chinese artist born in 1985 in Yunnan Province. She obtained in 2011 a master’s degree in Yunnan University Institute of Arts. Ma Dan’s works have been exhibited in the United States, Taiwan, and Beijing and at other major international art fairs

Ma Dan’s paintings construct an atmosphere of ineffable tranquility almost like in a dream. This atmosphere leads the viewer into the artist’s innocence and glistening green idyllic world that only comes from Ma Dan’s native Yunnan sceneries, and even more from her many exotic beautiful dreams. With delicate brush strokes, Ma Dan restores her dreams to its original form. This way of treating sceneries reminds us of the works of Henri Rousseau, who also painted luxuriant tropical vegetation with a kind of dreamlike atmosphere, drawing us back to memories of ancient times. In Ma Dan’s works we can find the same “primitivism”, freedom and innocence of that world created by Rousseau and, later on, by Dalí, Miró and surrealist painters.

In these bucolic landscapes the little girl in red, of whom the real face is never shown, which is deeply significant, is not only the probable self-portrait of the artist, the alter ego of Ma Dan, but this lonely, cute and pure image is also the key to the entrance of her dreams, or the passage leading to her subconscious realm. She becomes a guide and in the meantime a curious explorer somehow lost in that bucolic landscape. The choice of the cartoon style for the representation of the “pocket-size version” of Ma Dan is because cartoons can simplify the structure of reality. Chinese artists use this visual form that was originally intended for children to build a world anew and thus purify their ego. In fact for the Chinese artists of the younger generation the notion of ego represents an important and huge challenge: how to face and represent their true self. This is because starting from the seventies and the eighties the country began to change at an extremely pace: common national memories are gradually disappearing and being replaced by fragments of personal memories.

In fact Ma Dan’s paintings transmit the artist’s subjective emotions and imagination. Following our “little guide” we understand that Ma Dan’s innocence has its own strength and she uses this to purify our look; in this way these pictures want to be a sincere invitation to the viewer to participate and to share her joys and sorrows, so that the pain of alienation is alleviated through her art.