After studies of philosophy, Li Chevalier starts her artistic formation in Florence, then in London, at Royal Saint Martin's. Her singular road leads her nonetheless to ink painting, her original instinct. Thus, Li Chevalier will join, in the 1990s the movement of "Experimental ink". A response to the East-West divide that seeks neither confrontation nor compromise. Hers lies in a personal alchemy of the medium. After carefully preparing the canvas with a layer of acrylic and quartz, she paints with India ink, playing with chance guided by an intuitive memory that gives rise to a timeless landscape. A cosmic landscape, a twilight landscape swept by a light that sculpts mineral and lacustrine elements opening onto oceanic or celestial vastnesses. Unexpected forms emerge, evoking figures, a strange flora born of desert landscapes, emphasized by the grainy texture of the surface. There is something undoubtedly Romantic in her evocative landscapes and solitary figures, an aesthetic of the Sublime.
Today, she is internationally recognized, with major exhibitions all throughout the world - at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (MACRO ROMA) in 2017, a performance in 2024 at the Guimet Museum in 2024, and a series of three retrospectives of her work in 2010 at the National Museum of China in Pekin, the Today Museum in Pekin and the Museum of Fine Arts in Shanghai.
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Li ChevalierDistant Light, 2016Ink on canvas100 × 100 cm
39 2/5 × 39 2/5 inSigned and dated by the artist on the reverse -
Li ChevalierPassagers de l'existence, 2022Ink on canvas60 × 60 cm
23 3/5 × 23 3/5 inSigned and dated by the artist on the reverse -
Li ChevalierThe River of Absence, 2019Ink on canvas150 × 70 cm
59 1/10 × 27 3/5 inSigned and dated by the artist on the reverse
