Exhibition at the Schütz Art Museum - Li Hua

The horse is considered a symbol of strength, power, and independence in the cycle of the Chinese zodiac signs. On the occasion of the current Year of the Horse, shooting star Li Hua dedicates herself to this symbol of the wild. "Painting is passion. Painting is my life. And I am a slave to my painting." With the calmness of the wise and knowledgeable, the sensitive artist Li Hua responds to the question of "what life is really about." Painting is her life, has always been her life, her destiny, her passion, her obsessive love, says Li Hua, born in 1980. This passion earned her an award that had never before been granted to a woman in her homeland. In 2019, Li Hua received an honor that no woman in China had experienced before. In her hometown, the 30-million metropolis of Chongqing, a complete solo exhibition was dedicated to her. The retrospective was presented in her hometown of Chongqing and then in the major museums of the country. From early childhood, even before she could speak, the artist from humble beginnings drew. From 2001 to 2005, the artist born in the Chinese metropolis of Chongqing attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Sichuan. In 2005, not even 25 years old, her extraordinary talent was recognized with the LVMH Louis Vuitton-Moet-Hennessy Award, followed by a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service. Exhibitions in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Macau paved the way for further studies at the Paris "École nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts," with Daniel Richter at the Berlin University of the Arts, and at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in the master class of Erwin Bohatsch. The central theme in the work of the academically trained painter – who earned her doctorate in Vienna in 2014 – is reflections and multilayered abstracted reflections of existence. Her color palette is expressive, precise, opulent; her application of color is eruptive, strong, intense, emotional, flat, and plastic. In addition to oil paints on canvas, Li Hua often uses a sand mixture, as a tribute to André Masson, whom she admires as much as Frank Auerbach, Anselm Kiefer, Eugène Leroy, or the German Expressionist Emil Nolde. As sources of inspiration, Li Hua also names the Old Masters such as Tintoretto, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, or Oskar Kokoschka, whose style is strikingly reminiscent in her portraits. However, spontaneity and emotion are the most essential elements in the creation process of her work, she says herself. The expressive work of the humble shooting star is recognized internationally and has already enchanted museums and exhibition spaces in New York, Paris, Salzburg, and Vienna. Li Hua dissects her surroundings through her art; she dissects, analyzes, and reflects the chaos of coexistence, the chaos of existence in her paintings. Expressive, excessive, eruptive, emotional. Li Hua, outwardly the personification of calmness, possesses further layers. Hidden and mysterious. The true essence of her art lies in its emotionality. Her work is undoubtedly a mirror of the inner self, a visual puzzle of chaotic existence, visualized psychoanalysis.

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