Ma Kelu (born 1954, Shanghai) is a Chinese painter.[1] He first rose to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a member of the No Name Group, a circle of largely self-taught, underground artists based in Beijing, who worked in direct contravention of the Chinese government's official sponsorship of Socialist Realism. After the crackdown against avante garde artists during the "anti-spiritual pollution" campaign in 1986, he began to show his paintings in galleries in Berlin, New York, Boston, London, and Vancouver. In 2006, Ma's work was featured in the No Name Group Retrospective in Beijing, curated by internationally renowned Chinese art historian and critic Gao Minglu.[2]
He has recently exhibited in galleries at the 798 Art Zone, and at Beijing's Yuan Center.
While he began, like the other members of the No Name Group, to paint in the post-Impressionist style that was outlawed in China during the Cultural Revolution, his later work tends toward minimalism and abstraction. He has also painted a recent series of large-scale landscapes in the classical Chinese style, that are then glazed over with a thick layer of wax to create an ethereal, distorted effect.