Chinese artist Zhang Enli holds his first solo exhibition in the UK, showing a selection of new and recent paintings.

Born and brought up in Baicheng, a town in the north-east of China, Zhang Enli has been living and working in Shanghai for the past twenty years. His first paintings made in the metropolis betrayed a feeling of alien-ness, depicting scenes in which humanity was portrayed as somehow against its circumstances. Now usually unpopulated, Zhang Enli’s images are still very eloquent on the theme of the human condition.

At the same time, the artist’s technique has evolved out of more painterly gestures into an application of thinner colours, sometimes to the extent that his oils resemble the wash of traditional Chinese ink painting. On large canvases this suggests at once a kind of easy-going attitude, a mature confidence, and something more fugitive, as explained recently by the artist: “I deal with reality in order to express something that goes beyond reality”. This is not an evocation of some spiritual dimension or transcendentalism, so much as an understanding of objectivity as merely a comforting thought in an unfixed universe.

There is a modesty in Zhang Enli’s work that belies its profundity. A number of recent paintings depict containers of some sort – a bucket, a bottle, a box and so on – singled out for meditative scrutiny. Their personal, domestic quality reinforces our tendency to identify with them, to see them somehow invested with life. Caught between states of fullness and emptiness, such objects speak not only of utility, but also desire.

Zhang Enli’s paintings of trees are more anthropological. The way he crops them strongly suggests a snapshot as its source, and thus we easily imagine the artist standing on the ground with a camera, confronting these other living things. A new series of trees in winter, with bare limbs stark against grey-blue skies, conveys a bracing chilliness that is timely.

Zhang Enli’s exhibition is organised in collaboration with Kunsthalle, Bern and is supported by Visiting Arts.