Xinyi Cheng, Crossing I, 2019
Courtesy the artist and Balice Hertling
Contemporary Art Needs Big Gatherings and Gossip to Survive
A closed network of fairs, gallery shows, and exhibitions has become so crucial to developing and exposing talent at the top of the contemporary art world that, when people can’t gather, the market grinds to a halt.
Last June the art dealer Alexander Hertling filled his booth at Art Basel with 12 paintings by a young, relatively unknown artist named Xinyi Cheng. The Chinese-born, Paris-based painter depicts lightly surreal scenes: a naked figure cutting prosciutto, a vacant-looking man sticking his fingers into a glass of wine, a bearded nude caught in a circus net. All are executed in a layered, ever-so-slightly hazy, painterly style.
In his booth at the Swiss art fair, Hertling exhibited portraits of people Cheng had met over the past year—one for each month. “We’d sold her work before to some interesting collectors,” says Hertling, who co-founded the Parisian gallery Balice Hertling and was introduced to Cheng by one of his other artists. “But the Art Basel presentation opened her work to an international group of people.”