146 Contemporary is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition, Fight and Care, a two-person show with Elena Bulycheva and Zixu Wang, examining painting and notions of care and struggle in the arts and beyond.

In the art historical tradition of Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, or Imi Knoebel, Elena Bulycheva and Zixu Wang explore the sculptural qualities of painting as wall objects with their irregularly shaped canvases. The canvas can often be both a battleground and an object enforcing a great amount of care—think of the origins of ‘to curate’ derived from the Latin Curar, which stands for ‘to care’ or ‘to take care of.’ Once more, fighting and caring seem to be intertwined, as one must fight when one cares in the artist's studio, the art world, and beyond.

Elena Bulycheva is a contemporary painter and originator of K146 Kunstraum, symbolically opening her most recent artistic endeavor personally with Fight and Care. Bulycheva aims to stimulate experiment and dialogue, inviting local and international artists, as a curatorial extension of her artistic practice. She is best known for her abstract paintings, marked by an interplay of vivid color, texture, form, and irregularly shaped canvases. Unconventional processes derived from female labor—for instance, processing the canvas in a washing machine—result in cracks and crevices of paint from which the picture emerges. In her painterly process, Bulycheva transforms a smooth surface into a unique pattern of erosion, referring to the test of time but, most importantly, inspecting the fragility of her medium and approaching the canvas as a locus of social contexts and gendered values. Bulycheva aims to examine and challenge paintings’ historical nature of superiority and high culture with the everyday and activities perceived as inferior tasks due to societal conventions, imminently linked with female history—from laundry to motherhood, or from fighting to caring.

Zixu Wang’s take on irregularly shaped canvases is marked by a symbiosis of digital modeling and painting. The Chinese painter is best known for his trompe-l’oeil depictions of elementary forms and shapes—such as the circle and other edge-less variations—using the flatness of the picture plane to create visual illusions. By doing so, the treachery of images becomes the treachery of the image, examining the deceiving nature of seeing, but also of the artist. Emphasized by his unique interplay of light and shadow using airbrush techniques, the spatiality of the object and its presence have an ambiguous character. With great care, Wang composes these various forms into an individual entity, misleading the eye, and intriguing the mind.