2008 木桐酒标

November 2010
 

XU LEI ILLUSTRATES THE LABEL OF CH.TEAU MOUTON ROTHSCHILD 2008

Every year since 1945, a great artist has created an original artwork for the Chateau Mouton Rothschild label. Thus, the most famous names in contemporary art are brought together in a collection to which a new work is added each year.

The commission to illustrate the 2008 vintage was given to the Chinese painter Xu Lei, born in 1963. His poetic realism combines the cosmic and the intimate, the figurative and the symbolic, his country's pictorial tradition and Western modernity. A resident of Beijing, he is artistic director of the Today Art Museum, an important museum of contemporary art in the Chinese capital.

His drawing for Mouton takes up the classic theme of the ram, the emblem of the chateau. Perched on top of a delicately delineated rock, Xu Lei's ram asserts the role of a great wine as a link between people and cultures, from one hemisphere to the other of "planet wine".