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Architects: Miralles Tagliabue EMBT
- Year: 2016
Text description provided by the architects. The construction of Zhang Daqian museum, a project designed by Benedetta Tagliabue / EMBT, has begun a few months ago in Neijiang, China.
Zhang Daqian was one of the best-known and most prodigious Chinese artists of the 20th century. Originally known as a guohua painter, by the 1960s he was also renowned as a modern impressionist and expressionist painter.
On April 2010, Excellence Group invited EMBT to design Zhang Daqian’s museum in Neijang city, the painter’s hometown. In 1956 Zhang Daqian and Pablo Picasso met in Paris, where they exchanged ideas on art and initiated their friendship.
Neijiang city would like to continue this friendship between the two artists, and moreover between the two cities where they were born, Neijing and Malaga.
The design philosophy behind the museum was to integrate the cultural essence of East and West and build expressing the past and the future. The museum should grow from the existing tea house and extend its pavilions over and around a garden that moves topographically on different levels, enclosing some of the old trees within its scheme.
The motives and gestures extracted from Zhang Daqian’s painting will shape the ribs of the vertical structure, while the interpretation that the Chinese painter did of Picasso’s face will informs the geometries of the plan.
The site is located at the peak of Dong Tong Lu, Yuan Mountain, west of Xi Lin monastery, south of the Tuo River. The museum will be the landmark of the city.