The Denys-Puech Museum will be presenting an exhibition of the oeuvre of Xie Lei, a Chinese painter living and working in France and the winner of the 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize. The show will exhibit a series of previously unseen works, specifically created with the spaces of the museum in mind and will be accompanied by a catalog.

Xie Lei’s painting is characterized by its density and mystery. Surrounded by colorful halos that blur their contours and lend them a certain ambiguity, silhouettes of bodies emerge and dissolve successively. Suspended between the visible and the invisible, dreams and memories, Xie Lei’s painted works reveal and then conceal gestures that are as enigmatic as they are fleeting, expressing a vast array of human experiences and emotions.

These new works are based on contrasting states: day and night, clarity and obscurity, light and shadow. This duality is reinforced by the scenographic arrangement, with the mirrored hanging of the paintings on canvas and the works on paper on the opposing sides of the colonnade in the exhibition space.

The path of the exhibition has been designed in dialog with the architecture and collections of the museum. Xie Lei thus invites visitors on a sensory journey, where painting becomes a space for metamorphosis and shifting perceptions.


Carole Bouzid