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GALLERIA CONTINUA San Gimignano: CHEN ZHEN, BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE, LUCA PANCRAZZI, ARCANGELO SASSOLINO, NEDKO SOLAKOV - 27 Feb 2010 to 15 May 2010 Current Exhibition |
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CHEN ZHEN Purification Room, 2000 (detail) Photo: Ela Bialkowska
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GALLERIACONTINUA / San Gimignano opening Saturday 27 February 2010 at 6 pm CHEN ZHEN Purification Room BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE Elie LUCA PANCRAZZI Temporundum Continuo ARCANGELO SASSOLINO Qui e ora NEDKO SOLAKOV A Riffraff CHEN ZHEN PURIFICATION ROOM I cover a space and all the objects found there with earth. It is a sort of �monochrome tomb�. Rather than digging in search of objects from the past, as archaeologists do, my work consists of showing people present-day objects that will be found in the future� It is a kind of archaeology of the future� Chen Zhen) Chen Zhen used this procedure for a series of works from 1991 onwards, in A World in / out of the World, Light of Confession (1993), Future Archeology (1995) and Champ de d�sinfection (1995). Purification Room, realized in 2000, was the last work in this series. Using the natural process of the accumulation of earth, which slowly but surely covers once animate things and beings, Chen Zhen created a landscape in which all the objects are completely covered and encrusted with earth, forming a petrified field. Chen Zhen was born in Shanghai, China in 1955. In his home city he attended the Fine Arts and Craft School and the Drama Institute, specializing in set design. After moving to Paris, he studied at the Ecole Nationale Sup�rieure des Beaux-Arts and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques (where he later became a teacher) between 1986 and 1989. In the course of his career he received various international awards and scholarships, and showed his work in about a hundred solo and group exhibitions around the world, becoming a prominent figure on the international art scene. In 1990 he showed his first series of installations. From then on his artistic work dwelt entirely on three major periods of great importance for his own experience and his views on art: the Cultural Revolution, the reform of China and his engagement with the Western world. His work focuses on the relations between human beings, nature and objects; the incommunicability and lack of understanding between human beings; and finally on meditation and therapy. However, he was also interested in architecture and urbanization on a global scale. He died in Paris in 2000. Of the many exhibitions featuring the work of Chen Zhen, the following are particularly worthy of mention: Field of Waste, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA (1994, solo show); Fu Dao/Fu Dao, Upside-down Buddha � Arrival at Good Fortune, CCA � Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan (1997, solo schow); Jue Chang/Fifty Strokes to Each, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (1998, solo show); dAPERTutto/APERTO overALL/APERTO parTOUT/APERTO, 48th Venice Biennale, Venice (1999); Chen Zhen, In Praise of Black Magic, GAM � Galleria Civica d�Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (2000, solo show); Six Roots, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia (2000, solo show); Chen Zhen, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2001, solo show); Chen Zhen. Metaphors of the Body, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece (2002, solo show); Chen Zhen: a Tribute, P.S.1, New York, USA (2003, solo show); Chen Zhen, Silence Sonore, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2003, solo show); The Body as Landscape, Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria (2007, solo show); Il corpo come paesaggio, MaRT, Rovereto (2008, solo show); Fare mondi, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice (2009). BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE ELIE Galleria Continua is pleased to present Elie, a new solo exhibition by Berlinde De Bruyckere, one of the most significant figures on the international art scene. De Bruyckere�s career as an artist took off when she participated in the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, and has been soaring ever since. She has shown in prestigious venues such as the 3rd Moscow Biennial; the Kunsthalle of D�sseldorf (Germany); La Maison Rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert (France); and the 4th Berlin Biennial. Works by the artist are held in a number of important permanent collections: the Kunst Museum Luzern in Switzerland, the De Pont Foundation in Holland, the Fondazione Sandrettto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, the SMAK - Stedelijk museum voor actuele kunst in Gent (Belgium), the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki and the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. The expressive path trod by the Belgian artist stems from her need to deeply probe the human condition. Her sculptures can be seen as images of an archetypal pain, as reflections on themes that have always concerned human beings: suffering, solitude, death, recollection. Berlinde de Bruyckere was born in 1964 in the Belgian city of Gent, where she lives and works today. In her sculptural work she uses wax, wood, wool, leather and horsehair, modelling intense figures that suggest deformed human and animal forms. Often these figures are impersonal and fragmentary. The suffering, pain-filled universe of the artist�s works first drew the attention of the international art world at the beginning of the 1990s. In this early phase of her career, De Bruyckere built refuges, precarious, impermanent structures made from woven rags and piles of metal beds and blankets, offering a reflection on the desperate human search for refuge and protection. De Bruyckere�s current output is characterized by the exploration of opposites: life winning out over death, the capacity of love to redeem violence and fears, the violated body that simultaneously reveals and conceals itself. Charged with material force and sensuality, her wax or horse leather sculptures describe a world of victims and horrors, but also of human dignity, redemption and love. The artist has taken part in many exhibitions in recent years, including the solo shows All Creatures Great and Small, Zacheta, National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (Poland) and Le Printemps de Septembre, MAMCO, Toulouse (France), both in 2009, and the group exhibitions Disembodied, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, (USA), 2010; Moscow Biennial, Moscow (Russia), 2009; In-finitum, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2009; Silence, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (Switzerland), 2009; Le sort probable de l�homme qui avait aval� le fant�me, La Conciergerie, Paris (France), 2009; UN-SCR-1325, Chelsea Art Museum, New York (USA), 2009; Damaged Romancticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton NY (USA), 2009; Fatal Attraction: Diana and Actaeon, The Forbidden Gaze, Compton Verney, Warwickshire (UK), 2009; Assenze / Presenze>01, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, 2009; Compass in Hand, MoMa, New York (USA), 2009. LUCA PANCRAZZI TEMPORUNDUM CONTINUO Galleria Continua is pleased to be hosting a new exhibition project by Luca Pancrazzi, entitled Temporundum Continuo, realized in collaboration with Steve Piccolo. Luca Pancrazzi has shown in a number of biennials, including those of Venice, Moscow (Special Guests section), New Delhi and Montenegro, the Rome Quadriennale, and in exhibitions or collections such as Unicredit at the MAMbo in Bologna, the PS1 (New York) and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, UBS, the Museo Marino Marini (Florence), Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau (Munich), the GAM in Turin, Palazzo delle Papesse (Siena), the Centro di Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), PAC (Milan) and MART (Rovereto), acquiring a reputation as one of Italy�s distinctly international artists. The work of Luca Pancrazzi is always alert to grasp, through the experience of the gaze, a constant phase of reality. Being in movement across a landscape involves an unceasing honing of perception. All around us is landscape, from the images reflected in the mirrors to that framed through the glass of the windows in the vehicle used for the occasion. The constant, incessant perception of the gap between thought and vision becomes established as image-experience. Luca Pancrazzi was born in Figline Valdarno (Florence) in 1961. He lives and works in Milan and Tuscany. Pancrazzi has used a wide range of media in the course of his career to date, including painting, photography, video, sound, sculpture and large-scale installations. The central theme of his work is the creative process and the deconstruction of reality through the gaze. The overcoming of the boundary between inside and out, the staggering of time and perception, continual gaps and serial variations � these are the elements used by the artist in his investigations. His observation of reality and the almost anthropological way in which he probes the territory is never rendered in an objective, documentary fashion, but is always mediated, reconsidered through other languages, filtered by memory and finally internalized. This results in an acute sensitivity towards issues relating to the vision, construction, reproduction and transmission of images, and the perception and definition of the coordinates of space and time in contemporary reality. A non-narration that revolves around the concepts of centre and periphery, and the relationships that form between definition of the planned urban landscape and processes of perception of individuality. Luca Pancrazzi has shown extensively both in Italy and abroad. Recent exhibitions include: Glass Stress, Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Franchetti, Venice (2009); Collectors' Choice I + II, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2009); Sph�res, Galleria Continua / Le Moulin, Boissy-le-Ch�tel, France (2008); 15_ Quadriennale d�arte di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, (2008); Focus on Contemporary Italian Art, permanent collection, MAMbo, Museo d�Arte Moderna di Bologna (2008); Aktuelle Positionen italienischer Kunst, Landesmuseum Joanneum K�nstlerhaus Graz, Germany (2008); Fragile Beauty, Glass in the Focus of Art, Stiftung Museum Kunst Palast, D�sseldorf, Germany (2008); La citt� che sale. We try to build the future, Arcos, Benevento; MACRO, Rome (2007); Exp�rience Pommery, Domaine Pommery, Rheims, France (2007); Camera con vista, Palazzo Reale, Milan (2007); COLLEZIONISMI, il mondo come volutt� e simulazione, Assab One, Milan (2007). ARCANGELO SASSOLINO QUI E ORA Galleria Continua is pleased to present Qui e ora, a solo exhibition by the artist Arcangelo Sassolino, who is showing his work in the gallery for the first time. Internationally acclaimed by contemporary art critics, Sassolino has exhibited in a number of prestigious venues: the MART of Trento and Rovereto (2005), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, with a solo show entitled Superdome (2008), and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2009). Minimalist and rigorous, experimental and visionary, in his wok Sassolino explores the forces that govern the functioning and internal mechanisms of industrial machines. Drawing as required on the assistance of engineers, he produces sculptures and electronic devices based on an aesthetics of equilibriums pushed to the limit: threatening machines that furrow scars, cold, silent monsters that unexpectedly emit a sharp sound. Arcangelo Sassolino was born in 1967 in Vicenza, where he lives and works today. After attending the School of Visual Art in New York between 1990 and 1995, he stayed on in New York, working as a designer for the Casio toy company. He returned to Vicenza in 1996 and began his career as an artist. Sassolino has shown his work extensively both in Italy and abroad. Recent exhibitions include: What You See is What You Get, FRAC, Rheims, France (2007); Ginnunggagap, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice (2007); Forgotten Bar Project, Berlin, Germany (2008); Chateau de Tokyo / Palais de Fontainebleu, Fontainebleu, France (2008); Disarming Matter, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, Sweden (2008); Superdome, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (solo exhibition, 2008); Themes and Variations, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2009); Zweckgemeinschafft, Micamoca, Berlin, Germany (2009); Aspekte des sammelns, Essl Museum�Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg, Austria (2009). NEDKO SOLAKOV A RIFFRAFF Galleria Continua is pleased to announce A Riffraff, a new personal show by Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov. Solakov employs an ironic, metaphoric and poly-semantic style to analyse the role and contradictions inherent to the contemporary art system, its communicative mechanisms and its schizophrenic relationship with society and cultural geopolitics. Short narratives, aphorisms, comparative descriptions, plays on words and semantic double entendres slipped into the cracks and edges of walls or blending into wallpaper patterns are the characteristic elements of the artist�s idiom. The delicate and poetic images of the characters that populate Solakov�s creative universe seem to encapsulate our everyday lives, offering a subtle reflection on established authority, perception and human existence itself. Born in Tcherven Briag, Bulgaria, in 1957, Nedko Solakov lives and works in Sofia. He employs a very disparate range of techniques, media and idioms, ranging from drawing to video, and from the manipulation of found objects to performance pieces and even the creation of more strictly literary tales. His works offer themselves as representation in an increasingly fragmentary and ungraspable contemporary world, in which a single and unique representation and interpretation is impossible. Since the early 90s, Solakov has taken part in many exhibitions, both in Europe and the United States. He showed at Aperto �93 (Venice Biennale); the 48th, 49th, 50th and 52nd Venice Biennale; the 3rd, 4th and 9th Biennial of Istanbul; the Biennial of S�o Paulo �94; Manifesta 1, Rotterdam; the 2nd and 4th Biennial of Gwangju; the 5th Biennial of Lyon; Sonsbeek 9, Arnhem; the 4th and 5th Biennial of Cetinje; the 1st Biennial of Lodz; the 7th Biennial of Sharjah in the Arab Emirates; the 3rd Biennial of Tirana; the 2nd Biennial of Seville; the 2nd Biennial of Moscow; and at Documenta 12. Recently he has had solo shows at: Museu do Chiado, Lisbon; De Appel, Amsterdam; CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof�a, Madrid; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Centre d�Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Whitechapel Street Project, London; Castello di Rivoli, Turin. In 2003-2005 a major retrospective of his work, entitled A 12 1/3 (and even more) Year Survey, was presented at the Casino Luxembourg, Rooseum Malmoe and at the O.K Centrum Linz. |
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