Michael Goedhuis

Michael Goedhuis, trained as an economist with degrees at the Courtauld Institute in art history and with an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, started his career in investment banking in New York and London. He then joined Jacob Rothschild (now Lord Rothschild)’s Colnaghi specialising in Persian, Mughal and Islamic art. Major collections were curated and sold by him to numerous institutions including The Rothschild Collection to the Shahbanu of Iran and the Vever Collection to the Smithsonian Institution. He subsequently expanded his dealing activities to India, Japan and China, concentrating on important antiquities which he continues to deal in. During much of this time he was writing for The Economist on art and the art-market as well as for numerous art publications. In the early 1990s he began to concentrate on Chinese modern and contemporary art and was the first dealer in the West to enter this field with a series of important exhibitions including the pioneering exhibition at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2001 China Without Borders: Chinese Contemporary Art. In 2008 he assembled and curated the major contemporary Chinese art collection, the Estella collection, which was exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Most of his activity since then has been directed at describing both the resurgence of cultural activity in the China of today and the key relevance of Chinese Ink art to contemporary aesthetics. In addition to representing the best contemporary Chinese artists, his activities now include exhibiting work by the best of the new generation of Western artists, both painters and sculptors.
MICHAEL GOEDHUIS LONDON
61 Cadogan Square,
London SW1X 0HZ
United Kingdom
Mon – Fri, 11 am – 5 pm by appointment
Tel: +44 (0)20 7823 1395
Mobile: +44 (0)77 6062 5375
Email london@michaelgoedhuis.com
COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:
Wei Ligang
Born in Datong, Shanxi, in 1964, Wei Ligang has been at the forefront of contemporary ink painting’s development from its beginning, and he was one of the organizers of the June 1999 “Bashu Parade” exhibition. Wei studied mathematics at the Nankai University in Tianjin and he became the president of the calligraphy society at the university. After graduating in 1985, Wei was assigned to teach mathematics at the Teachers’ Training School in the industrial city of Taiyuan, but he succeeded in persuading the school to allow him to teach calligraphy in 1988. Wei Ligang moved to Beijing in 1995 to concentrate on his art. His training in mathematics has contributed to his abstract form of calligraphy. Wei Ligang constantly deconstructs and re-forms the characters in his paintings while hinting at traditional script-forms (such as formal, running, or “grass” script), thus declaring his deep roots in Chinese culture. His works were included in the pioneering exhibition organized by Gordon Barrass at the British Museum in 2002.
Li Chevalier
Born Beijing 1961. Aged 15, Li Chevalier, a gifted vocalist, joined the Opera Ensemble of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army for five years. She later joined an intellectual movement centred on humanist ideas that were notorious in China at the time, but were dissolved due to the Anti Spiritual Pollution Campaign. Chevalier then left for Paris in 1984 to study Philosophy at the Sorbonne for which she received a postgraduate degree in 1990 after doing her undergraduate studies at Sciences Politiques. She subsequently studied art in various European capitals including Paris and Florence, receiving her last diploma from the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London after which she was selected for the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2007. Chevalier continues to exploit her musical background in major installations, most recently in Siena at the Santa Maria della Scala. Her work is notable not only for its technical virtuosity and its aesthetic innovations but for the philosophical hinterland on which it rests.
