In his almost half-century-long career, the esteemed ink-wash artist Jizi (1942–2015) created a vast body of work during a dynamic period of Chinese history. Opening next week at WhiteBox on the Lower East Side, “Jizi: Journey of the Spirit,” a memorial retrospective curated in association with the artist’s son, includes a selection of large-scale paintings (and a monumentally-sized, rarely exhibited, scroll) that reveal Jizi’s decades-long search for a synthesis of styles, cultures, and ideas that honor tradition, reinforce the ideal of the universal oneness of all things, and embrace personal expression. In its abstraction, its expressiveness, and its spiritual dimension — packed with painterly instincts that recall Kline, Motherwell, and Dzubas — Jizi’s luminous work can claim particular resonance for New York audiences. JID designed the promotional materials, including a movie-size poster.
Tim Rollins (1962–2018)
A great artist and a good friend, Tim Rollins, died suddenly a week ago. Tributes to Tim, and his important work with the K.O.S. collective he founded, immediately appeared all over the arts press, and today the Times published a long obituary that appropriately honored his extraordinary career and personality. I had the privilege of getting to know Tim at WhiteBox, where in 2003 we showed his large-scale installation “War of the Worlds”, and where he showed up at just about every opening and event, in his signature black suit and cowboy hat. For several months I worked with him developing a book surveying the huge body of work he generated with K.O.S., a group of gifted but underprivileged student/collaborators to whom he was devoted, as they were to him. Sadly, that book never got published — it was presented to major publishers at a dip in his career — but, aside from MIT Press’s 2009 history of the group, no retrospective catalogue of Tim’s art has since emerged. I’m sitting on a pile of archival material that Tim provided me, and I’m thinking, since his star has risen in every sense, that it might now be time to pitch the proposal again. —John Isaacs