The Académie Conti, a collaborative project between the Consortium Museum and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, presents Chinese artist Xie Fan's first institutional exhibition in Europe Various Fires. Curated by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim of the Consortium Museum, this exhibition is on view from 27 April to 1 September 2024.
Only the word 'Small' is missing from the exhibition title for it to echo a tribute to Ed Ruscha and his now legendary series of small books that capture photographs of situations, landscapes, and objects taken at the turn of the 1960s.
This exhibition features three series of Xie's small terracotta paintings, ranging from the size of a postcard to that of an LP. Created specifically for the show, the most recent paintings depict hopping fires—Flames—on very dark backgrounds—campfires, bonfires, yellow flames. The other two series comprise five Golden Sea on one side of the exhibition space and more than ten Celestial Signs, including the Cloud series, on the other.
