CHU TEH-CHUN (1920 - 2014)

Le 20 janvier 1979 Oil on canvas, signed lower right, countersigned, dedicated and dated on reverse 46 x 61 cm 18 7/64 x 24 1/64 in. Chu Teh-Chun Chu Teh Chun is a Chinese painter, who was born in 1920 in the province of Jiangsu and passed away in 2014 in France. He trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou where he developed a hybrid art, between East and West. Trained from his early years in calligraphy and classical Chinese poetry, it is however the paintings of Cézanne, Degas and Matisse that fascinate and influence him the most. He is one of the great masters of lyrical abstraction. This unpublished work dating from 1979 is reminiscent of his famous snow series. As an abstract landscape painter, Chu Teh-Chun fell in love with the French mountains in the mid-1960s and from then on he set out to depict their complex beauty. This oil on canvas, in which white represents a major part of its surface, evokes a winter mountain landscape, all about cliffs and reliefs, and whose bluish tones evoke icy reflections of snow. The peaceful elegance of this painting leads the viewer to a certain form of serenity as his gaze wanders beyond the abstract peaks of the cold and hostile mountains.