Raphaelle Goethals & Wanxin Zhang: Biculturalism in Contemporary Art

Turner Carroll Gallery 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.986.9800 turnercarrollgallery.com info@turnercarrollgallery.com Essay: Tonya Turner Carroll Design: Shastyn Blomquist Photography: courtesy of the artists Front Cover: Raphaëlle Goethals Elsewhere is Beautiful encaustic on panel 40 x 42 in.

Wanxin Zhang The Waves fired clay 42 x 20 x 15 in.

Inside Front Cover: Wanxin Zhang Blue Buddha’s Head fired clay 8 x 10 x 16 in.

Back Cover: Raphaëlle Goethals Adrift encaustic on panel 54 x 60 in.

Special thanks to the McManis-Wigh China Foundation for their sponsorship of this exhibition

BICULTURALISM IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Belgian painter Raphaëlle Goethals and Chinese sculptor Wanxin Zhang work with different materials and ideologies, yet they both share a profound sense of bicultural identity. Goethals grew up taking in Northern Renaissance masterworks in European museums; the sense of refined light, movement within the composition, and moody atmosphere those paintings possess remain evident in her paintings today. Zhang’s sculptures still display his awe in witnessing the Xian army of 8,099 individualized clay warriors guarding the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. While both artists’ works are informed by the rich, historic visual cultures from their native lands, they are also infused with the expansive, iconic optimism of their new home—the United States.

RAPHAËLLE GOETHALS Raphaëlle recalls being immersed in Flemish art starting at an early age, on frequent museum trips with her mother. In addition to the profound devotion, clarity of light and movement within space she found in early Northern European paintings, Goethals developed a fascination with their meaningful use of materials in the work. “I was always interested in materials; experimenting with marble dust, salt, and other media,” she says of her nascent artistic career. From Early Renaissance painters working with egg tempera on panel and fresco to German conceptual artist Wolfgang Laib--who used beeswax, pollen, and other natural materials—Raphaëlle absorbed the European significance of natural materials, beauty, light, and composition.

After graduating from the Le Septante-Cinq in Brussels, Raphaëlle moved from Belgium to Los Angeles in the 1980s, to attend the Otis Art Institute. Her time in Los Angeles was “one of learning, seeing, and adapting to a new language and culture.” She found kindred artistic spirits in American artists such as Robert Irwin of the Light and Space Movement. Raphaëlle made paintings that embraced American culture—in her own words “large, fearless, and emotional.”

The most significant bicultural element emerging in Raphaëlle’s painting is her unique blending of European meditative devotion and beauty, with American abstract expression. She begins each painting with the ancient technique of patiently applying wax and pigment to birch panel. Raphaëlle says she starts “often in the color red, the color of our insides. I work from the inside out, from flesh to spirit.” Goethals punctuates the layers of wax and pigment in her paintings with minimalist hints of grids and dots, allowing the eye a place to rest in its journey through the dreamlike space she creates. Rather than being defined by one physical or ideological space, Goethals seeks for her paintings to belong to the world, to “bridge the personal and universal, the expressive and minimal,” merging visual and personal memory.

Goethals’ paintings have been widely exhibited, and have been featured in Art Forum, Art in America, THE, Luxe, Architectural Digest, and many regional publications. Her work is held in numerous selective private and public collections, including the Boise Art Museum, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, California, and the Paul Allen Collection in Seattle.

WANXIN ZHANG Wanxin Zhang relocated from China to the U.S. in 1992, and his works contrast the greatness of Chinese culture with the experience of being a contemporary Chinese-American artist. Zhang looks back at Chinese culture through a lens of new-found American artistic freedom, juxtaposing tensions between Eastern and Western culture and socio-political ideals. Zhang often uses his work for social impact, visually commenting on the historically manipulative Maoist regime and an intensely controlled Chinese culture. He describes, “When I visited the terracotta warriors of the Qin excavations, I immediately realized the feudalism and oppression from the Qin dynasty have never quite left China.” Many of his works target Chinese cultural censorship, as can only be done by an artist who has left it and found creative liberty.

Zhang’s recent works focus on creating a sense of peaceful freedom within chaotic society. Since 2017, Zhang often manifests his work in meditative figures. The figures are textured and have variable patinas, suggesting the presence of history and cultural memory carried through each decade of his work regardless of location. These works, featured in Turner Carroll’s exhibition, embody Zhang’s blended and bicultural identity, coupling his overt socio-political messaging with a look at the meditative, independent spirit.

Zhang earned a degree in sculpture in 1985 at the LuXun Academy of Fine Art in China, later completing his master’s degree in the U.S. He was awarded a Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant and a Joan Mitchell Grant. His works were included in the UBC Sculpture Biennial in Japan, in the Taipei Ceramics Biennial, and at the Da Tong 2nd International Sculpture Biennial in China. Zhang’s works have been exhibited in numerous museums, including the University of Wyoming Art Museum, the Arizona State University Art Museum, the Boise Art Museum, the Fresno Art Museum in California, The Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art in Michigan the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington, and the Holter Museum of Art in Montana. His works have been selected to be included in Confrontational Ceramics by Judith Schwartz, and can be found in major art magazines such as Art News, Art in America, Sculpture, and American Ceramics. Numerous esteemed private collectors collect Zhang’s sculpture nationally and internationally.

Tonya Turner Carroll

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals The Other Side of Now encaustic on panel 72 x 60 in.

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals Albo II encaustic on panel 54 x 52 in.

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Wanxin Zhang Warhol/Mao fired clay and pigment 81 x 27 x 20 in.

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Wanxin Zhang Snow Day fired clay 19 x 12 x 15 in.

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals Liquid Sky (deep blue) encaustic on panel 48 x 84 in.

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals Elsewhere is Beautiful encaustic on panel 40 x 42 in.

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Wanxin Zhang Meditation Series V fired clay 19 x 12 x 15 in.

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Wanxin Zhang Rainbow Day fired clay 56 x 18 x 18 in.

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals Thera encaustic on panel 78 x 69 in.

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals Dust Stories (horizontal lines) encaustic on panel 40 x 42 in.

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Wanxin Zhang Pink Warrior bronze 78 x 18 x 24 in.

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Wanxin Zhang Meditation Series VI fired clay 19 x 12 x 15 in.

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals Alfa Blue encaustic on panel 38 x 40 in.

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Wanxin Zhang Meditation Series II fired clay 19 x 12 x 15 in.

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals Reflecting in You encaustic on panel 60 x 70 in.

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Wanxin Zhang Wanxin Zhang grew up in China, and moved to the United States as an adult. As a child in China, he was fascinated with sculpture, and his most inspiring moment in art was when he first saw the warriors at Xian, from the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210 B.C. Zhang was struck by the great care the artists had taken in making each warrior’s individualized characteristics.

Two millenia later, Zhang, also a Chinese sculptor, decided to make his own contemporary “warriors.” His personages are not guarding the tomb of an emperor they serve; instead, they express their modern, urban freedoms. Some sport contemporary hairstyles, glasses, even binoculars, to assert the fact that they hold the treasures of history in their souls, yet they forge their own way forward. His seated meditating figures embody the power of individual introspection.

Zhang’s works have drawn great curatorial and critical acclaim in the United States.

Museums from one coast to the other have featured his works in their exhibitions and permanent collections.

Selected Collections Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA Annie Wong Art Foundation, Hong Kong, China Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco, CA City of Albuquerque, Albuquerque, NM City of Changchun, Changchun, China City of Dalian, Dalian, China Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA Holter Museum of Art, Helena, MT Lowe Museum of Art, Coral Gables, FL National Fine Art Gallery, Beijing, China New Mexico Arts Division, Santa Fe, NM University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie, WY

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Wanxin Zhang Meditation Series I fired clay 19 x 12 x 15 in.

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RaphaËlle Goethals Raphaëlle Goethals was born in Belgium, and her childhood was spent absorbing the beauty of European art. Goethals moved to the United States to complete her art degree in Los Angeles, where she finalized her own sensuous abstract style. After only a short time in the United States, Raphaëlle’s works attracted the attention of curators, private collectors, and art critics throughout the U.S.; her paintings became highly desirable additions to their collections. The U.S. Department of State curated Raphaëlle’s paintings into its Art in Embassies program, thus exhibiting her paintings in the American Embassy in Nigeria.

Raphaëlle’s paintings are preoccupied with light and the space between heaven and earth. She sees painting as a space of exploration, where one can become lost in the atmosphere of beauty. She places concrete elements like the circle, calligraphic gestural mark, or the spiral, to give the eye and the mind a place to rest while exploring her painting. She likes to blur the boundaries of material, visual language, and time, by using the historic medium of wax and subtle palette in her highly contemporary, enormously gorgeous paintings.

“With its immobile, bordered presence, painting asks us for time, humility, patience and reflection. In the vast space in front of us, in the field of consciousness drawing us in yet staring back at us, we succumb to a powerful gravitational pull where we can recognize ourselves.” — Raphaëlle Goethals Selected Collections Paul Allen Collection, Seattle, WA The Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO Designer West, San Francisco, CA The Four Seasons Resort, Scottsdale, AZ Hewlett Packard, San Francisco, CA Holdenried Collection, Grünwald, Germany Herstand Collection, Miami, FL Kennedy Group, Dallas, TX Lincoln National Corporation, Radnor, PA Metz Collection, Sioux City, IA The Millennium Group Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM The Regent Bal Harbour, Miami, FL The Ritz Carlton, Palm Beach, FL Time Warner, New York, NY Topfer Collection, Austin, TX U.S. Department of State Weill Cornell Medical Center, NY Stephen A. Wynn Collection, Las Vegas, NV Art in Embassies Program, U.S. Consulate, Nigeria numerous private collections in the US, Belgium and Dubai

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RaphaĂŤlle Goethals False Anxiety encaustic on panel 40 x 42 in.

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