Solar Yitian is greatest identified for her work of monumentally enlarged mass-produced objects, typically based mostly on staged pictures taken by the artist herself. Lovingly rendered in colourful acrylic paint, the surfaces of the inflatable toys or the heads of dolls—each frequent motifs—shine brightly, typically with flecks of reflecting digital camera lights seen. Solar Yitian’s use of scale additional attracts consideration to the inherent stress between pathos and banality on which the works draw: vastly enlarged the objects stare upon us from their enormous eyes as if in puzzlement of their newfound luxurious grandeur.

On the gallery three works from Solar Yitian’s sequence of doll heads will probably be on view. Depicted in gigantic scale, the three male heads look out unconcerned on the world round them with a pleasant smile. Every portray portrays a head with distinct pores and skin tone and hair coloration in opposition to a close to monochromatic background and ground. The bearded Alger has darkish brown hair and honey-colored pores and skin; Kevin is dark-haired and Black; Jason is blond-haired and fair-skinned. The heads are set in a deeply compressed area, but the viewer nonetheless infers a three-dimensional space from the darkish shadow they forged. With their depictions of gracefully curved lips and completely positioned cheekbones, the work seize the generalized great thing about dolls. Small particulars—amongst them a bit the place Alger’s beard rubbed off, Kevin’s impossibly easy hairline or the way in which Jason’s strands of blond hair are inserted into the doll’s head—draw consideration to the paradoxical state wherein the dolls’ life-like but vacuous presence hovers.

Iconography and Solar Yitian’s method of execution are completely paired: the plastic shells of the represented toys, their photographic illustration, and the flatness of the painted canvas fuse, tenderly capturing mass-produced objects in a standard medium related to particular person expression and distinctive creation. Seen up shut, the impression of the work’ photographic precision dissipates, because the painterly and coloristic results created by the artist’s skilled utility of paint develop into obvious. Fastidiously positioned to seduce our gaze—to “take away all resistance to notion” in Solar Yitian’s phrases—the subtlety of this impact permits the works to exist in a constantly contested realm between illustration and abstraction.

at Esther Schipper, Berlin
till Might 25, 2023