‘啊打-No.28’— 马可鲁
The Ada series, initiated in 2016, marks a crucial turning point in Ma Kelu's artistic career. This transformation stemmed from profound introspection following his major forty-year retrospective in 2011. Confronting the accumulated richness of past experiments, complex thoughts, and exploratory paths within his oeuvre, Ma Kelu resolved to embark on a more fundamental change.
Within the Ada series, painting breaks free from the constraints of visual intuition, transforming into material traces and temporal sedimentation. Employing large formats, intense chromatic fields, and restrained manual intervention, the artist challenges viewers' traditional perceptual modes of painting, reconstructing the experience of viewing. The Ada series represents Ma Kelu's radical interrogation of painting's essence. He decisively strips away elements traditionally emphasized—narrative, expression of meaning, and technical display—establishing instead new principles of "meaninglessness", "non-technique" and "no distinction between East and West". This seeks to discard all predetermined labels and return to painting's most primordial origins in search of answers. During creation, Ma Kelu deliberately minimizes the intervention of the "hand", pursuing a state of relaxation and lightness, allowing the painting to emerge as naturally as breath. This approach—akin to "minimal effort achieving maximum effect"—eschews deliberate artifice and overt exertion. Pictorial details are not meticulously designed but arise naturally from the act of painting itself, preserving a profound painterly quality within extreme concision.
Collectively, the works in the Ada series exhibit a unique homogeneity, as if sharing a single cohesive aura. Yet, each individual work simultaneously nurtures an independent character within this unity. Like naturally occurring imprints sharing a common origin yet diverse in form, they ultimately converge towards the pure traces of time and matter naturally flowing and solidifying.
Ma Kelu was born in Shanghai in 1954 and later relocated to Beijing, is one of the members of the "The No Name Painting Association," a contemporary Chinese art group from the 1970s. Committed to the practice of "art returning to its essence," Ma Kelu has always been dedicated to the principle of achieving complete freedom in his artistic creation. He participated in the underground art exhibition in 1974 and the public exhibition of the Nameless Painting Society in 1979, and in the early 1980s, he became a member of the Beijing Abstract Art Experimental Group. His early landscape works exceeded the general significance of sketching from life, with his practice itself characterized by distinct artistic propositions, research awareness, and working methods. He moved to New York at an early age and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Until 2006, Ma Kelu returned to his hometown, continuing his abstract style with a broader vision.
Selected Collections:
His works have been collected by numerous international public institutions and private collectors, including the National Museum of China, Tate Modern, Guangdong Art Museum, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Museum, Yuan Art Museum, Yinchuan Museum of Art, Inside-Out Art Museum, Shanghai Himalaya Museum, Hong Kong's M+ Art Museum, He Art Museum, Goldman Sachs in the United States, and Deshan Art Space.
