At “Art Basel 2013” the A arte Studio Invernizzi gallery is presenting an exhibition project which creates a dialogue between the works by Niele Toroni and those by the Italian artist Dadamaino.
 
The works by Niele Toroni, characterised by sequences of marks made by a no. 50 brush at a distance of 30 cm from each other and left on different types of surfaces, with their constant and faithful rhythm present a possible path, a succession of hypothetical passes that can be crossed and that with their physical existence describe an elementary and physiological relationship with the world, at the same time sounding its space in order to discover its essence.
In the same way the intermittence of the signs drawn out by Dadamaino, purposely fragmentary and discontinuous, opens a complex dialogue with existence itself which is announced as being potentially infinite and changeable as is the very essence of living, subject to the rhythm of time and yet belonging to the inexhaustible movement of the universe in its becoming.
 
The exhibition project does not limit itself to flanking the work processes and formal results achieved by the two artists. It also wants to endorse a significative reflection regarding the value of the gesture and the sign which characterises both artists and that is ‘declined’ by them according to different and parallel modalities, in this way comparing and more fully investigating these same modalities in the privileged key of today's creativity.

The exhibition presents 15 paintings of medium and large size paintings created specifically in response to the gallery space.
Gregor Gleiwitz challenges the observer’s engagement and experience of painting through depictions of figures, shapes and body fragments that begin from dense areas without ever identifying themselves as definitively figurative. His painting are characterized by a dynamic interplay of forms that emerge on a common ground, yet, whose expression is to let our imagination wander and presuppose.
Faceless entities and undefined bodies appear to the observer, seemingly wanting to explode and going beyond the limits of the canvas. A depicted gestation of hybrid figures, between man and animal, vegetable and mineral forms defy any clear recognition and labeling. The images range between substantial and insubstantial, they remain suspended in a timeless interval between becoming and dissolution.
They are paintings that language fails to acutely articulate, the visual language has no distinctive element subject to any definitive correlation, objective categorization or definite conclusion. The images of Gregor Gleiwitz thus reveal nothing in our eyes, but persist in their manifestation.
 
Gregor Gleiwitz born in Poland in 1977, lives and works in Berlin. He exhibited in 2007 in Santiago de Chile Santiago de El poster Matucana 100 in 2008 in Cologne, Cologne Simultanhalle in 2009 in Berlin Hüttendong, After The Butcher, in 2010 in Dusseldorf and Mannehim Seb Koberstädt, Gregor Gleiwitz im Dok25 in 2012 im Reflex des Erkennens ist das Gegenüber sichtbar Manzoni Schäper at Galerie in Berlin, participates in the international exhibition MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI, international Kunst in Deutschland - Sprengel Museum in Hannover, the presented last two important group shows at the Galerie in Berlin Manzoni Schäper There is something between me and the outside world and at the Galerie Mikael Andersen titled Ikarier.

La Galleria MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea ha il piacere di presentare la mostra personale di Roberta Savelli, una delle figure più sensibili del panorama milanese. L’artista, che collabora con la galleria dal 2005, anno della sua prima esposizione negli spazi di C.so Venezia, ha atteso il compimento di un nuovo importante ciclo di opere per riproporsi alla propria città con la consapevolezza di artista ormai matura.
Il lavoro di Roberta Savelli, infatti, in questi anni si è arricchito di contenuti che, pur mantenendo le caratteristiche formali legate alla figurazione, hanno certamente richiesto un approfondimento del pensiero.
Esercizi di matematica è il risultato di un anno di intuizioni trasformate in sperimentazioni e di confronti con argomenti e ambiti nuovi. La partenza di questo affascinante progetto è la passione letteraria della Savelli per l’Alice di Lewis Carroll, professore di matematica, che conduce l’artista “oltre lo specchio” per indagare il suo controverso rapporto con la matematica e con chi, come sua sorella, vive e lavora in questo mondo teso alla sintesi e alla ricerca di ordine. È da questo intimo e personale raffronto che l’artista va alla ricerca del legame della propria arte con il mondo della scienza dei numeri e delle regole che li governano e, in senso più lato, con una parte di sé che fino ad oggi aveva tenuto lontana. Partendo da un’ipotesi di lavoro, attraverso un processo di introspezione, Roberta Savelli ha applicato un metodo scientifico di semplificazione logica e funzionale, con veri e propri esercizi di disegno e di pittura mirati a perfezionare questa particolare relazione. Uno scambio di corrispondenza con matematici ed scienziati le ha, inoltre, fornito gli stimoli per approfondire e modificare la propria ricerca in corso d’opera, approdando ad una soluzione sicuramente diversa da quella supposta in partenza.
Il risultato di questa lunga equazione è una mostra nella quale le eleganti figure che contraddistinguono il lavoro dell’artista, si stagliano su fondi costellati di astri e definiti da un ordine meditativo assolutamente mentale, lo stesso che anima i nuovi paesaggi, essenziali e rigorosi.
Un’inedita carta da parati disegnata dall’artista stessa, è il fondale sul quale la sua morbida linea rossa scorre, disegnando figure nella sequenza delle posizioni yoga del Saluto al sole. Questa pratica che l’artista segue da tempo consente di aprire i propri centri all’energia solare, e a quella del cosmo in generale, e le ha fornito concentrazione e ispirazione per questo percorso metafisico tra terra e universo, realtà e immaginazione, pratica artistica e teoria scientifica.

“Three (Talents) in a Boat”:
Kate Fichard / Bernhard Kahrmann / Erica Nyholm
curated by Domenico de Chirico
 
Do you know the sense of humour of British writer and journalist Jerome Klapka Jerome?
Definitely far from the ways of farse, easy puns and obscene innuendos, this humour in fact derives from observation of common and daily circumstances. From the unsuspected.
His name is most commonly associated to his most famous work, the comedy Three Men in a Boat (1889). Boating upstream in river Thames, friends Jerome, Harris and George, with their loyal friend Montmorency the dog, travel on their boat for days and live new and unexpected adventures that never fail to move.
Three main characters at comparison, each with their own unique language. Three artists compared: Bernhard, Erica and Kate.
Only one will: communicate. Here they are on the same boat. Playing.
They suggest three different readings of the surrounding world, all joined by a strong sensitivity, attention and aesthetic research.
 
Bernard Kahrmann (German, born in 1973), Erica Nyholm (Finnish, born in 1982) and Kate Fichard (Anglo-French, born in 1987) launch the first collective exhibition curated by Domenico de Chirico. Two of them were among the “Jeune Talents” in the Paris Photo edition of 2012.
While the water and family sceneries frame self-reflection wishes (Erica Nyholm) and the light shows itself in hues of gleams, so dear to Giuseppe Ungaretti (Bernard Kahrmann), the suspension and capsizing highlight the unforeseen with a touch of witticism (Kate Fichard).
“To Say Nothing of the Dog”!

Gloria Maria Gallery is pleased to announce the new group exhibition curated by Attilia Fattori
Franchini.
A guide, is a collection of information leading through unknown topics or places often utilized with the aim of exploration.
The exhibition takes its title from a 1977’s science-fiction comedy series created by Douglas Adams and used as inspiration for the first web open encyclopedias.
The concept of classification and presentation of worldly knowledge is taken as a point of departure to reflect about perception, reality and the internet in a post-digital age.
The show revolves around the constitutive textual and visual elements of digital interfaces, as layout, audio and content accessibility, overlooking at their legacy and influence within contemporary artistic practice.
Computer, i-phone and i-pads rapidly evolving formats and mass-producing images and (mis) information contribute to a new configuration of the world often biased, constantly shifting between physical and digital, fictional and personal, influencing the way we absorb and understand reality.
This duality and its contextualisation is explored through the work of eight international artists, looking at the convergence between embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, artistic creation and digital vision.
GLORIA MARIA GALLERY VIA WATT 32 MILAN WWW.GLORIAMARIAGALLERY.COM
Artists
Rhys Coren
www.rhyscoren.co.uk/
Paul Flannery
www.paulflannery.co.uk/
Aude Pariset
www.audepariset.net
Yuri Pattison
www.yuripattison.com/
Lorenzo Senni TBC
www.prestorecords.com/lorenzosenni.html
Travess Smalley
www.travesssmalley.com/
Priscilla Tea
artevisuale.it/artist/priscilla-tea/cover
Amalia Ulman
www.amaliaulman.eu/

Viafarini DOCVA presents Luca Monterastelli‘s solo exhibition. white - endlessy rocking, a project that epitomizes the commitment of the Milanese non-profit organization to foster the dialogue between artistic practices and workshop – oriented, handcrafted and industrial productions.
Monterastelli inquires into the relationship between material and tecnique inside the aesthetic artists’ research. White – endlessy rocking proves how the connection between visual art and other kind of art drives to an accelerated process of creation. In the same way this process establishes a new collaboration between art and designers‘ culture.
The exhibition itinerary creates a sculptural world, marked by Baroque elements, using the Faenza traditional ceramic manifacturing techniques, as well as incision processes and investment casting. The exhibition in characterized by material drifts, condensations and hardenings, organized in a specific Neoclassical installative matrix: compressing without strangling: literary references, coreographic strategies and fleeting architectures, incorporations and impulses’ excessive deployments. Building, stockpiling, drawing and moving.
Monterastelli‘s solo show highlights a real revenge of secondary objects, materializes figures of speech, using material in a citationist way and tautological elements focusing on their deviances and preciousness. Meanwhile, the sculpture refuses the attribution’s game. A non rethorical plaster work, used in a onomatopoeic value. A simple, trivial, phenomenological white. A pornographic scenario. Non fetishist.
 
At 5.30 pm, a conversation with the artist, the curators and the three partners involved will introduce the exhibition. On this occasion, the artist‘s career and a series of publications and documents of project’s partners will be presented.
 

Luca Monterastelli Solo shows: 2012: open studio Parc Saint Léger, Centre d‘art contemporain Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-eaux (F); Graceland - Chez Néon - Diffuseur d’Art Contemporain, Lion; 2011: La camera degli sposi - a work for a couple, MARS, Milan Artist Run Space, Milan. Group shows in 2013: Senza Titolo, Michele Guido, Domenico Antonio Mancini, Luca Monterastelli, Lia Rumma, Naples; nel 2012: MARS mission, Geh8, Dresden; nel 2011: Un problème insoluble, La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille; nel 2010: Una luce rischiara l‘oscuro scrutare. La morte non sa leggere, curated by Marco Tagliafierro, galleria 1+1 Milan; All strange away, curated by Beniamino Foschini, neon>campobase, Bologna; L’uomo ridotto, curated by Luca Francesconi, Brown Project Space, Milan. Residencies in 2012: Residénces secondaires, Centre d'art contemporain Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-eaux; nel 2011: Solid Void, Progetto Diogene Bivacco Urbano, Turin; Residency Suddenly, Beauchery-Saint-Martin; Residency Triangle France, La Friche La Belle de Mai, Marseille
Thanks to Luca Francesconi and Lia Rumma Gallery for the organization and the logistical support.

Aldo Mondino: nomade
a cura di Achille Bonito Oliva
 
Milano, Fondazione Mudima
5 giugno - 5 luglio 2013
Inaugurazione: martedì 4 giugno, ore 18.30
 
Dopo la mostra personale di Aldo Mondino tenutasi nel 1990 alla Fondazione Mudima di Milano, a distanza di 23 anni, viene ripresentata nella stessa sede una significativa selezione di opere a cura di Achille Bonito Oliva e in collaborazione con l’Archivio Aldo Mondino. Dal 5 giugno al 5 luglio, si ritrovano alcune delle grandi installazioni realizzate per quella storica occasione, oltre ad alcune opere scelte tra le serie più note dell’artista torinese (1938-2005).
 
A testimonianza del periodo trascorso dall’artista a Parigi dal 1959 al 1960, anni in cui frequenta l’École du Louvre e stringe amicizia con Tancredi entrando in contatto col milieu intellettuale dell’epoca, si ritrova in mostra la scultura in bronzo Tour Eiffel (h. circa 2,40 mt.), vero e proprio assemblage dei più disparati oggetti del suo studio a formare un ironico omaggio al simbolo della capitale francese. Insieme all’altra scultura bronzea Arabesque, l’ingresso alla mostra è segnato dalla presenza di Ittiodromo una potentissima installazione del 1967 che accosta uno scivolo per bambini a un vero pesce di grandi dimensioni lasciatovi sgocciolare sulla superficie.
Dal 1963 - quando rientra in Italia, e in occasione della mostra torinese alla Galleria Sperone del 1964 - i temi del gioco e dell’infanzia diventano ricorrenti nella sua ricerca artistica che incomincia a fare della relazione col pubblico uno strumento attivo di partecipazione all’opera.
 
La riflessione sulla storia della pittura e sulle tecniche diventa l’elemento portante di molte opere, come quella con i palloncini qui esposta, proveniente dalla serie creata nel 1965 per la Galleria Stein di Torino. L’elemento ludico e partecipativo è del resto presente in tutta la sua opera successiva, accompagnato all’uso di materiali extra-pittorici, effimeri e talvolta edibili che, come ha lui stesso dichiarato: “sono il frutto di quella dimensione miope, di quella distanza che mi fa vedere da lontano un oggetto che da vicino diventa un altro…”. Lo testimoniano le installazioni realizzate con la pasta di caramella, col cioccolato o con lo zucchero, come nello spettacolare Muro del Pianto (4x6,40 m) fatto di zucchero e costruito all’interno dello spazio espositivo o nell’ambiente interamente ricoperto di marshmallows realizzato al piano terra o nell’installazione a pavimento Raccolto in preghiera, un enorme tappeto di preghiera fatto da decine di granaglie diverse. In dialogo con quest’ultimo, su una grande parete, sono esposti i celebri Tappeti realizzati su eraclite, un materiale usato nell’edilizia, in colori brillanti: sovrapposti e accostati conferiscono alle sale dello spazio milanese la girandola di colori di un fantasmagorico suk medio-orientale.
 
Costantemente mobile nei suoi riferimenti e nel gioco delle sue sfide ai luoghi comuni, la mostra indaga così anche quella parte della ricerca di Mondino contaminata dalle suggestioni orientali ed esotiche immagazzinate nei tanti viaggi dal Marocco alla Palestina. Elemento presente in mostra anche nelle opere dedicate ai Dervisci rotanti, dove Mondino intravede, come ha lasciato scritto “…un affascinante parallelismo tra la preghiera e l’intensità dell’attenzione nel dipingere in modo concettuale, innamorandomi della preghiera esaltata delle danze dei Dervisci”.
La grande installazione del 2005 dedicata a I cacciatori di orchidee, composta da tre grandi serre e ambientata a pianterreno, riafferma quel misto di nostalgia per l’esotico, per l’arcano misterioso e l’immancabile ironia che contraddistingue l’opera di uno degli artisti italiani più significativi dell’arte contemporanea.
 
Accompagna la mostra un catalogo edito da Mudima Edizioni, con testi di Achille Bonito Oliva, Gianluca Ranzi e una selezione di testi di Aldo Mondino.
 
Scheda della mostra
Titolo Aldo Mondino: nomade
A cura di Achille Bonito Oliva
Sede Fondazione Mudima | Via Tadino 26, Milano
Date 5 giugno – 5 luglio 2013
Inaugura martedì 4 giugno, ore 18.30
Orario lunedì – venerdì 11.00 - 13.00/15.00 - 19.30
Ingresso libero
Catalogo edito da Mudima Edizioni, con testi di Achille Bonito Oliva, Gianluca Ranzi e una selezione di testi di Aldo Mondino.
 
Info al pubblico Archivio Aldo Mondino
T. + 39 02 33 60 77 05 | info@aldomondino.it
Fondazione Mudima
T. +39 02 29 40 96 33 | info@mudima.net | www.mudima.net
 
Ufficio stampa NORA comunicazione – Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo
Via A. Sforza 9 | 20136 Milano t. +39 339 89 59 372
info@noracomunicazione.it | www.noracomunicazione.it

The A arte Studio Invernizzi gallery will be opening on Thursday 16 May 2013 at 6.30 p.m. a solo exhibition of the German artist, Günter Umberg. As has been the case of the previous exhibitions held in the gallery since 1996, also on this occasion the artist has specifically ideated an exhibition plan in which the “corpus” of works is considered in relation to the exhibition space.
 
By way of a coherent artistic approach Günter Umberg very personally interprets and investigates the theme of the monochrome with the result that his works acquire the “status” of fully corporeal entities, concrete and accomplished conditions, inextricably forming part of the context of the real and of lived experience.
The first room of the gallery‘s upper floor will exhibit the work “Territorium 20A, 2012, 2013” made up of six works ordered and placed on the walls so as to create a definite space suited to perceptive experience, in this way creating a dialogical connection between the works, the room and the spectator who is called upon to interact and become an active part of the work and space.
The second room of the same floor will, for the first time in Italy, present a group of works dating to 1976: these are sheets of transparent paper immersed in pure pigments mixed with wax and paraffin on which the artist made holes.
Following an intense dialogical procedure that continues what is exhibited in the other rooms, the rooms of the lower floor of the gallery house “Territorium 22, 2013, 2013” and a number of recent works characterised by intense colours.
“For Umberg” as explained by Paolo Bolpagni “the monochrome is living and pulsating energy, the condition and place of infinite possibilities: it is like the point that contains everything ‘in nuce‘ and potency, an original (‘ursprünglich‘) a-dimensional entity where, however, totality is already present. It is not something casual that he likes citing an episode from the life of Bernard of Clairvaux who on being asked about the concept he had of God replied: ‘Height, length, width, depth’. With this there is no intention to affirm that in Umberg there are necessarily transcendent or metaphysical ’traits‘ but, if anything, that the characteristics in which the medieval saint summed up the idea of the Supreme Being are the same nucleus of the notion of painting developed by him. A painting that in the monochrome has its fulfillment, its completion and its ‘raison d’être‘”.
 
On the occasion of the exhibition a bilingual catalogue will be published with reproductions of the works on show, an introductory essay by Paolo Bolpagni, a poem by Carlo Invernizzi and an up-to-date biographical and bibliographical notes.

Massimo De Carlo is pleased to present How To Live? a solo exhibition by American artist Andrea Zittel. The exhibition will present five new works from Zittel‘s ongoing series, Prototypes for Billboards, and a video titled How To Live?: A dynamic essay about liberation and it’s complexities.
 
This new video portrays a settlement in the southern California desert, on a piece of land that no one seems to own. It is free to live on this land and there are no restrictions on what people can or cannot do there. With this glimpse into one community‘s liberation from mass society, the video touches on the existential nature of freedom, as it’s price, and meaning are called into question.
 
In contrast to the outdoor settlement presented in the video, the painted billboard prototypes depict intimate and detailed interiors from the artist’s home, the ongoing site-specific project entitled A-Z West, also located in the southern California desert. As the images of these domestic settings embody the same questions that emerge in the video work, we see the artist carry the weight of these questions into the everyday and every action.
 
The overarching question of How To Live? is lifted directly from the essays of Michel de Montaigne, who’s life’s writings comprise a massive volume of essays and anecdotes on all the nuances of day-to-day living. Zittel, like Montaigne, in a very personal and idiosyncratic manner, continues her life’s work of asking these questions, constantly rewriting them, and allowing them to evolve in accordance to time and place.
 
Andrea Zittel was born in 1965 in Escondido California. She received a BFA in painting and sculpture from San Diego State University, and an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. In the early 1990s she first established her practice in New York. One of her most visible projects in New York was A-Z East, a small row house in Brooklyn which she turned into a showroom testing grounds for her prototypes for living. In 1999 she moved back to the West Coast, eventually settling in the High Desert region next to Joshua Tree National Park at founded A-Z West. Andrea is a co-organizer of the High Desert Test Sites and the A-Z smockshop in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, Doccumenta X, Skulture project in Munster, and both the 1995 and the 2004 Whitney Biennials. She has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh; The Diechtorhallen in Hamburg; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, NY; The Museum for Gegenwartskunst in Basel; The Louisiana Museum in Denmark, the Schaulager in Basel and Magasin 3 in Stockholm. Her 2005-2007 North American traveling survey show Critical Space traveled to The New Museum, The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Albright Knox museum in Buffalo, NY; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

STEFANO ARIENTI
Manifesti
 
Giovedì 23 maggio 2013 dalle ore 18.30 inaugura una nuova mostra personale di Stefano Arienti dal titolo “Manifesti”.
 
Per la sua nuova mostra personale presso lo Studio Guenzani, Stefano Arienti presenta dei lavori realizzati nel 2013.
Si alterneranno nelle due sale della galleria manifesti traforati e sculture di terracotta. Come accade spesso nei suoi lavori, anche in questo caso l’artista ha scelto di lavorare due materiali poveri, la carta e l’argilla cruda.
Il processo di lavorazione di questi avviene in alcuni casi contemporaneamente, utilizzando aghi e altri strumenti. Traforando il manifesto, l’artista trasferisce l’immagine nell’argilla ancora soffice. Seguendo le linee e i contorni principali dell’immagine del manifesto, Arienti opera la propria personale reinterpretazione della stessa donandole un nuovo significato.
Terminata la lavorazione il manifesto viene esposto mostrandone il retro: una superficie bianca sulla quale i fori suggeriscono la figura di partenza.
I soggetti di queste nuove opere sono quelli dei posters da collezione. In vendita nei bookshop, alle mostre o nei mercatini, si tratta di immagini riconoscibili da tutti, tratte dalla storia dell’arte: Picasso, Matisse, Mucha, Klimt, Botticelli, quelli più famosi. Emerge ancora una volta l’importanza che ha la ricerca, la collezione, la decontestualizzazione delle immagini, ma anche l’elemento giocoso all’interno di tutta la produzione di Arienti.
La tecnica della traforatura era già stata sperimentata in passato dall’artista. Alla fine degli anni 80’ Arienti aveva eseguito i primi posters traforati e nel 1989 aveva realizzato una grande scultura in terracotta traducendo in centinaia di mattoni due libri di disegni.
 
La mostra inaugurerà in parallelo con la galleria Marignana|arte di Venezia, che aprirà la sua programmazione proprio con una mostra dedicata all’artista mantovano.
 
Stefano Arienti è nato ad Asola (Mantova) nel 1961. Vive e lavora a Milano
 
La mostra proseguirà fino al 26 luglio 2013
Orari: dal martedì al sabato dalle 15.00 alle 19.30. La mattina su appuntamento.
Per maggiori informazioni:
t: 02.29409251 mail: info@studioguenzani.it

Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition “Trauma of the Exposed Body”, the first solo project of the acclaimed Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu, in the gallery’s premises in the Church San Matteo, Lucca.
 
Curated by Maria Rus Bojan, the exhibition revisits an important period from his creation, presenting works from the end of the 1970’s, when the artist investigated body issues through self-performative practices and also newer works, in which the body plays a central role.
 
Within the recent history of Romanian art, Ion Grigorescu has been one of the first artists who examined the social and cultural significance of body art, providing a new conceptual framework for defining a particular neo-avant garde that underlines the dramatic shift in the conception of the artistic subject.
 
Embracing a rather particular mix of approaches and spiritual perspectives, Ion Grigorescu practices body art as a mode of transfiguring himself, and as a tool to interrogate the meaning of his own existence, and also of the human condition in general.
 
“Trauma of the Exposed Body” is an artistic approach that reiterates the idea that the essence of life is inscribed on our body. Referring to the biblical moment when Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God by tasting fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, lose their innocence and become suddenly aware of their nakedness, Grigorescu emphasizes his own trauma caused by revealing his nude body in front of divinity. A practicing Christian and an artist who earned his existence by painting orthodox churches, Grigorescu underlines that the biblical sense of nudity indicates man’s spiritual purity and therefore, it is not a sacrilege, nor an offense to present himself naked before God.
 
The exhibition describes the artist’s struggle to conciliate the fundamental contradiction between his desire of experiencing nakedness as an expression of primordial spiritual purity and the traumatic acknowledgement of the original sin. Considering that too many layers had covered the spiritual nakedness of this world, Ion Grigorescu has chosen the oldest church from Lucca, the 10th century Romanic Basilica San Matteo, as a background for a spiritual unfolding of his ritual of harmonizing the body and mind. One can perceive this performative approach as a ritual of healing and of liberation from dogma and prejudice.
 
Conceived to work as a single installation, the display alternates projected images alluding to Christianity from his most famous 1970’s series of photographic works, such as “Ritual Bath” and “Washing with Light “, with mundane elements such as “White Wash”, “Braiding Hair”, “Athletics” or “Homage to Muybridge”, and with a more recent video projection entitled “Start”. The aim is to create the impression of a performative frieze that adds a different layer to the already sacred and charged space of the church.
 
Ion Grigorescu – born in 1945 in Bucharest, where he lives and works – is one of the most important representatives of performance and conceptual art in Romania and Eastern Europe. After 1989 he gained international recognition, and his works were shown at important exhibitions such as the São Paulo Art Biennial (1981 and 1994), Wanderlieder, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1991); Le corps photographié, FRAC Alsace (1996); The Body and The East, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Out of Action, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). Among his most recent exhibitions are Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011), Les Promesses du passé, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011), and the solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2009), and the National Museum of Art, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2011). He represented Romania at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and 2011.

Massimo Giacon could be considered one of the first and most authoritative Italian Lowbrow artists. Unfortunately, though, he began his work when the term Lowbrow hadn’t found its way into the art world yet. In 1982, at the age of 20, he showed work in the same spaces that presented early drawings by the still unknown artist Keith Haring, at the Triennial of Drawing in Nuremberg. Keith Haring later became very famous; Giacon, on the other hand, is still alive and full of good intentions.
 
Comics, illustrations, paintings on wooden panels, canvas, teapots, objects in porcelain and plastic, Alessi, Artemide, Memphis, fabrics, articles in glass, tumblers, shakers, soap dispenser, carpets, Swatch watches, chandeliers, graphics, never completed projects, finished ones, performances, concerts, songs, vinyl records, CDs, covers, graphic novels, music videos, animations, murals, digital images printed on photographic paper, sketches, ceramics, items for the holiday season, stickers, figurines, posters, T-shirts, neckties, candlesticks, calling cards, restaurant menus, postage stamps, sex, religion, flyers for clubs, plates, flatware, pen holders…
Who knows is something exists that Giacon has never designed? Of course, there must be many things: aircraft carriers, fighter-bombers, weapons, cages for animals, prisons, posters for election campaigns, religious biographies, churches, jackets for dogs…
 
This exhibition traces back through the work of Massimo Giacon over the last 30 years, without any attempt to construct a tribute or a chronological retrospective. Together with the artist, we have selected small and large treasures from his archives and those of various public and private collections, to make a map of his work, a map that also becomes a sort of travel diary of our history and the last 30 years in Italy, full of creativity, effort, frustration, flashes of insight, more or less brilliant ideas, optimism, pessimism, hope, dismay, bitter irony and gentle sarcasm, with the comic strip as the leitmotiv and tutelary deity.
 
“We constantly look at the world and our perception is dulled. But if we change our perspective, if we see it as if for the first time, it can still be breathtaking.”
Alan Moore: Watchmen - Dr. Manhattan.
 
During the opening the artist will do the performance “The Illustrated Man”.
 
Opening Thursday 6 June at 18.30
on view until 26 July 2013
Tuesday – Friday, 10.00-13.00 and 15.00-19.00 – Saturday 15.00-19.00
(closed on Saturdays in July)
 
Massimo Giacon was born in Padua in 1961. Since 1980 he has worked in Milan as a creator of comics, illustrator, designer, artist and musician. He was a leading figure starting in the early 1980s in the renewal of Italian comics triggered by magazines like Frigidaire, Alter, Linus, Dolce Vita, Cyborg, Nova Express. He also works as a designer, with prestigious studios and brands (Sottsass, Mendini, Alessi, Artemide, Swatch, Memphis, Olivetti). In 1990 he began to concentrate on art, leading to many solo and group shows in Italy and elsewhere. Since 1983 he has also organized various independent bands and solo music projects. Recently he has been singing, with the band Massimo Giacon & The Blass. Current activities include the creation of design objects, publishing projects (books, magazines, graphic novels), and ongoing work on art and performance.

Brand New Gallery is pleased to present Snails, solo exhibition of London-based French artist Nicolas Deshayes.
Deshayes presents two huge modular and futuristic installations, one composed of eight big panels in plastic and aluminum, in which the mechanic and organic forms are molded together; the second, more sculptural one, transfers his work to a horizontal plane. To accentuate the artist’s interest towards the past, small friezes are placed in unreachable spots on the walls, fleeing from the spectator’s distracted sight, notifying the anachronistic past.
The discrepancy between the existence of disordered bodies in antithesis to aseptic obsessions to which we are exposed on a daily basis, interests Deshayes’ works which trigger an investigation through the manipulation of surfaces. The membranes of his pieces recall biological forms, denying the artificial materials and industrial techniques used during the production process.
Despite his preferred materials are commonly associated with minimalism, most of Deshayes’ works evoke organic and malleable forms. The artist molds its properties through chemical and industrial processes: anodized aluminum, vacuum formed plastic, molds and fusions are transformed into devices that generate synthetically colored futuristic works recalling the ‘80’s.
Nicolas Deshayes shapes hybrid sculptures, endowed with strong cultural and stylistic references, with a vigorous sense of hyper-materiality. His works combine mechanisms and materials that distort the ordinary, maintaining the human presence while embracing the lacquered aesthetic canons of the XXI century. While the human body is never directly included in his works, its qualities are always present, emphasizing the conflict between the permanence of materials, treated with a chemical and demiurgic approach, and the transience of the human body.
 
Nicolas Deshayes was born in 1983 in Nancy, France. After having obtained his bachelor at Chelsea College of Art and Design and a Master at the Royal College of Art, specializing in Sculpture, he participated to different exhibitions and art events in Europe and in the United States. Recently his works have been included in solo shows at Jonathan Viner Gallery in London and LISTE in Basel; group shows at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London, the Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and James Fuentes in New York. In the summer 2013 he will have his solo exhibition at S1 Artspace Museum in Sheffield. His works are included in important public and private collections such as the Saatchi Gallery in London. He lives and works in London.

‘The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.’
Charles Willson Peale
 
Brand New Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Tails, American artist Egan Frantz‘s first one-person exhibition in Italy. On show five different types of artworks that range from baguette sculptures, arrows, fountains, decorative needles to a gouache of an elephant tail. Tails presents new works alongside some more-familiar ones which have been publicly developed over the years.
A visual artist’s work is not purely philosophical and no one is entitled to take this designation. In the past it has been useful to consider what artists do in relation to philosophers’ ideas only in the name of attraction to rhetorical impasse.
Even great anti-philosophers such as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan have been played into relation with Frantz' sculptures. His work, created through the assembly of pre-existing objects is to be taken to the letter, through the same procedures that regulate language.
Unlike philosophy and psychoanalysis, closely related to the transmission of knowledge, art is substantially concerned with the transmission of truth which is connected to objective reality. In the fruition process you already have the words to define what you are seeing, thus, expressing it out loud may or may not change how you have already been affecting the work, pointing out how the piece itself incorporates the artist’s intentions, without the need to be explained.
Apparently illogical, Egan Frantz’s works come from an extremely rational premeditated approach, in which the linguistic aspect becomes essential, in a calibrated philological and meticulously detailed contemplation. The artist entwines a spider-web connecting all of his works through considerations that verge towards absurdity.
 
Egan Frantz was born in 1986 in Connecticut, USA. He graduated from Hampshire College in 2009 under the advisory of the late poet Robert Seydel. Recent exhibitions include “Egan Frantz: Multiples” at Tilton Gallery in New York and “Room Temperature”, Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles; “The Serial Poem 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6″ at Tomorrow, Toronto; and “Sequence 3” at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Forthcoming exhibitions include Art Statements and Art 44 Basel, Basel.

Building Utopia and Abstraction
 
opening June 20, 6.30 p.m.
June 20 – September 19, 2013
 
Federico Bianchi Contemporary Art is glad to present the collective exhibition Building Utopia and Abstraction, opening on June 20, 2013 (6.30 p.m.) in via Imbonati 12, Milan, featuring works by Giuseppe Armenia, Paola Di Bello, Radomir Damnjan, Zuzanna Janin, Tony Just, Jacopo Mazzonelli, Domenico Piccolo, Bert Theis, Magda Tothova, Alexander Wolff, Pierre Poggi, Jacopo Prina, Anna Orlikowska, almost all shown for the first time.
 
To construct a utopia is always an act of negation toward an existing reality, a desire to transform it.Leszek Kolakowski, 1968 – The dimension of abstract art finds a psychological sense in the search for a visionary world, new and moulded after shapes to match ideals, beyond the mere formal/real dimension of things.
 
Building abstraction, or better to generally abstract, leads to a utopic (wished for) vision of the spaces (in Bert Theis’ active installations or in Pierre Poggi’s football fields transformations), or to a radicalization of the forms of reality (in Alexander Wolff, Radomir Damnjan e Jacopo Prina’s works).
 
It starts from the perspective of reality deformed in the works “natural-mente” by Paola Di Bello and Domenico Piccolo’s paintings to get to an object or a concept that is abstracted itself in Giuseppe Armenia and Zuzanna Janin’s works.
 
The cancellation in Tony Just’s painting goes back to the basic concept of abstraction, as a not immediately recognizable reality, because as Hilton Kramer well underlines in “Abstaction and Utopia”, abstract artists don’t question the existence of the material world, their goal was change it - to eliminate its imperfections in order to establish an ideal harmony, at once social an spiritual, in every sphere of earthly human endeavour. This is quite visible in the works of Magda Tothova and Anna Orlikowska.
 
To keep quoting Kramer: “whereas theosophical belief is essentially religious in nature, utopian thought is fundamentally political, for it seks to realize its model of human perfection by bringing about a radical transformation of society and its institutions. while both envision an ideal future, it is in the nature of utopian thought to imagine that the particular “heaven” it hypothesizes can be created on earth.”
 
Abstraction has therefore in this exhibition a definite ideal value that rises, amplifies and transcends the sphere of art.