Tag: contemporary art

NOT PROVISIONAL ISABELLA NAZZARRI – VIVIANA VALLA double solo curated by Ivan Quaroni in collaboration with ABC-ARTE di Genova 8/2-2/3 2018

February 2, 2018

Opening 2018 March 8th, 6pm

 

The double solo exhibition of Isabella Nazzarri (Livorno, 1987) and Viviana Valla (Voghera, 1986) focuses on the direct comparison between the different methodological and stylistic approaches that the two artists used to build their own original pictorial language.

Focused on an essentially gestural and erratic process, Isabella Nazzarri’s painting coagulates in a series of surprising shapes, characterized by vivid and brilliant colors that stand out on monochromatic backgrounds in the papers as in the canvases. The light precipitated in the pigments becomes the material also of her sculptures, made of colored resins enclosed in glass ampoules (Monadi) or expanded polyurethane molded to evoke the rock formations and calcareous deposits present in nature.

Based on the stratigraphy of paper materials is the research of Viviana Valla, who through the reworking of post-it, clippings of magazines, pre-printed sheets, shreds of silver papers and much more builds an intimate and diaristic painting that paradoxically assumes the appearance of a geometric composition. The theme of her investigation is the conflict between emotionality and censorship, which is expressed in a continuous balance between the accumulative method, of an intuitive nature, and the rigid control exercised on the often orthogonal forms of his compositions.

Both Isabella Nazzarri’s erratic method, based on gestural trust and freedom and on chromatic and signic lightness, as well as the critical and conflictual one by Viviana Valla, articulated in a dynamic contrast between emotionality and rationality, prefigure the assumption of responsibility towards the pictorial language, used as an interpretative filter for the construction of a Weltanschauung, a vision of the world.

The title Not Provisional alludes to the committed and “non-temporary” character of the pictorial approaches of Nazzarri and Valla. The two Italian artists, in fact, differently from provisional painters who avoid the overload of expectations linked to a secular medium such as painting, accept to elaborate grammars capable of expressing the dubious, enigmatic and uncertain character that is on the origin of the visual art training.
The exhibition Not Provisional presents about thirty works – including paintings, papers and sculptures – of the recent production of the two artists.

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CALENDARIO GUTENBERG 2018: young italian artists curated by Massimo Bignardi

January 15, 2018

Tuesday, January 23 at 6pm opening of the exhibition of selected works for the valuable publishing, now in its 15th edition, dedicated this year to Italian artists under 30.

The exhibition proposes the works of Andrea Bressan (Cittadella, Padova), Flavia Bucci (Castel Frentano, Chieti), Emanuela Cruccu (San Gavino Monreale, Medio Campidano), Francesca Dondoglio (Torino), Flavia Carla Fanara (Formello, Roma), Roberta Favarato (Milano), Marco Goi (Sabbioneta, Mantova), Xhimi Hoti (Verona), Annatonia Luperto (Galatone, Lecce), Davide Pisapia (Napoli), Andrea Schifano (Castro, Lecce), Marco Tallone (Revello, Cuneo); paintings, drawings, engravings, photographs that testify to a new generation of Italian art.

The works on show are the winners of the competition announced by Gutenberg Edizioni for the realization of the 2018 CALENDAR: a contest in which 78 young artists under 30 participated, a significant adhesion that responds to the novelty that, from fifteen editions, marks the calendar art. The commission composed of Massimo Bignardi (Storia dell’arte contemporanea, Università di Siena), Danilo Maestosi (journalist and novelist), Franco Marrocco (artist and Director of  Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera-Milano) e Giuseppe Rescigno (artist) has selected the works that today articulate the GUTENBERG CALENDAR 2018.

The exhibition will run till February 3rd (from Tuesday to Saturday from 4 pm to 7 pm).

A JOURNEY TO DISCOVER ART AND SUBURBS: the ARP art residency in Rome of SKUBALISTO and JORDAN SWEKE concluded

December 19, 2017

Public art has become in recent years not only an alternative form of expression, but also a real stage with which artists confront and dialogue. We no longer speak of a conflict between an artwork that is by definition donated to the community and an artwork that is born to be sold under the rules of the market: artists more and more often move freely between these two options, until a few years ago considered in antithesis. Rome offers several examples of public art: from the fantastic intervention by William Kentridge Triumphs & Laments on the Lungotevere banks under Ponte Sisto, to the SanBa project that designed San Basilio’s public housing according to a specific urban redevelopment project, to the spontaneous open-air gallery that is flourishing in Corviale  at the foot of the famous building called ‘Serpentone’, to arrive at interventions in the occupied realities such as the Tufello students’ house run by the Astra activists. ARP has made a journey to discover these realities together with the South African artists Skubalisto and Jordan Sweke participating in the residency in Rome in November and December 2017.

Both artists chosen this year by the ARP-Art Residency Project (created by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro with the contribution of MAECI and with the collaboration of Everard Read/CIRCA and RainbowMediaNPO) have an interest in the investigation of urban reality, as well it is the gentrification of the peripheral areas or redevelopment planned by social and housing policies, or even fertile ground of public artistic commission. Their investigation of the Roman reality has therefore often turned to those areas that could offer fertile inspirations. In parallel to the study that led to the realization of the exhibition REALTA’ IMMAGINARIE/IMAGINING REALITIES that was held at the Centro Luigi Di Sarro (30th November-14th December 2017), the two artists also wanted to bet on the public art front, realizing some works in the Roman suburbs: in Corviale (where they worked thanks to the hospitality of Alessandro Fornaci and the Laborintus Association and to the Prenestino, in a center for asylum seekers, a place of high symbolic value. In these years there is much discussion about what to do and how to give meaning to interculture: Art is one of the most universal means of communication and friendship between people.

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“In the middle of the walk of our life, I found myself in a dark forest … (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Hell)”,  the quote of the greatest Italian poet is not accidental and takes on meaning at the end of the long journey of meetings and crossings of routes that the two artists, guests of the ARP residence, have completed in the Capital. Jordan Sweke’s forest and the Skubalisto’s portraits tell of the past and the present. The immediate interest that both have shown for the urban socio-economic structure integrated with their artistic research has given rise to a very deep dialogue in their practice and with the inhabitants of the city. Dialogue that was realized with the final two-handed work performed in Corviale.

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MIBACT: PASSEGGIATE FOTOGRAFICHE ROMANE – LA FOTOGRAFIA SPERIMENTALE DI LUIGI DI SARRO a cura di Carlotta Sylos Calò. 

December 7, 2017

On show, under the umbrella of “Passeggiate Fotografiche Romane” powered by MIBACT, the exhibition will runs untill the 30th of January 2018, LA FOTOGRAFIA SPERIMENTALE DI LUIGI DI SARRO. The show will officially open the international and national celebrations of 40 years from Luigi Di Sarro death. Guided tours with the curator can be booked in advance. (info@centroluigidisarro.it)

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In the forty years of the death of Luigi Di Sarro, the Center for Contemporary Art Research named after him celebrates his memory with a series of exhibitions dedicated to his work, starting with LA FOTOGRAFIA SPERIMENTALE DI LUIGI DI SARRO, curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò and focused on the photographic production from 1968 to 1976 and enriched by an in-depth study of drawing and sculpture.

Since the Sixties Luigi Di Sarro has worked with different techniques and languages: drawing, painting, graphics, sculpture and photography. The latter becomes, starting from the end of the decade, one of the elective means to develop themes already strongly linked to his work. According to an open approach, already applied to other techniques, photography becomes a way to observe reality, create new forms and points of view, even ‘playing’ with the photographic medium, both in the shooting phase and in the development and printing phase. In his research, in fact, the artist does not involve only the image but its constitutive process: sets up sets in his studio to make particular shots, and often, after printing in the darkroom, intervenes again, cutting out the prints, creating maquette and collage that then re-photographs. The leading actor of many of the images of the ample photographic corpus produced by Di Sarro between 1968 and 1976 is the same artist who often puts himself on stage to measure analytically the functioning of some phenomena such as movement, sign, color and light.

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IMAGINING REALITIES – SKUBALISTO and JORDAN SWEKE – 2017 November 30th/December 14th

November 23, 2017

 

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Jordan Sweke (1991) and Skumbuzo (Skubalisto) Vabaza (1987), from Cape Town to Rome thanks to ARP-Art Residency Project, will show their outlook on the City and its suburbs. People and landscapes, imagining realities: a journey that explores the present and the history of the Caput Mundi through various expressive media (painting, graphics and videos). The two South African artists produced artworks for this exhibition during the six-weeks residency period in Italy.

The ARP, a Bilateral Residency Programme for Young Artists between Italy and South Africa, is promoted by the CENTRO DI DOCUMENTAZIONE DELLA RICERCA ARTISTICA CONTEMPORANEA LUIGI DI SARRO and realized with the contribution of MAECI, Italian ministry of Foreign Affaires and International Cooperation, and with the collaboration of the Everard Read/CIRCA Gallery. In Cape Town, next February and March 2018, ARP will host italian artists Elena Giustozzi and Caterina Silva, selected to the residency programme, which will also see the collaboration of Ruth Prowse School of Art and Rainbow Media NPO.

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Skumbuzo’s narrative is multifaceted (including visual art, design, music and fashion), he often incorporates contemporary figuration, imbued traditional iconography and several urban ‘graffiti’ based languages. Skumbuzo’s work aims to break down the human experience to its very core in order to expose the man made social constructs that serve to separate. His work is a bridge illustrating commonalities of consumerism, industrialization, corruption, hope, family, heart break, race , nationality and religion. His graffiti background and street art influence become obvious with his abstract use of colours and stylistic figure painting technique.
Jordan works within notions of the landscape and the natural environment. He abstractly explores ‘nature’ – a sublime and all-encompassing force. More specifically, he explores the relationship which currently exists between humanity and nature and ways in which this relationship might be reconstituted. His main focus of production lies in large oil paintings, but a rounded conceptual framework is achieved through his creation of photographs, sculptures, video works, print media and installation.
Both these young Cape-Town-based creatives have come together in ARP Rome 2017/2018 for IMAGINING REALITIES. This presentation comprises separate artworks, as well as collaborative work resulting from merging conversations between the two artists. At the Centro Luigi Di Sarro, Skumbuzo’s portrait paintings (in various mixed media) and Jordan’s landscapes (monochrome drawings, canvas based paintings and video work) are installed alongside collaborative linocuts and paintings executed together while in Rome on the ARP Residency.
The relationship between people and their environments is one of the major themes of the exhibition. IMAGINING REALITIES aims to address the notions of each person’s ‘reality’- how they see the world, and in contrast what goes on unnoticed around us all. Skumbuzo’s and Jordan’s active conversations illustrate and imagine what is taking place for many, addressing ideas of ‘marginalized poverty and the many unseen inhabitants of Rome’. This speaks about relationships between foreigners and the Roman landscapes, and serves to address “the social impact of immigrants, and the realities that lie behind the idealised ways people frame what they see and live.”
Skumbuzo and Jordan exist within the organic creative frameworks that pulsate around them in Cape Town, and both artists have an ongoing interest in periphery spaces and working-class areas. The ARP experience in Rome has served to ignite a joint conversation about the peoples in Rome, their ‘landscapes’ and the city itself. Although both artists actively acknowledge that this is a social commentary from an outsider’s perspective, they too feel ‘there are ridges of social and cultural similarities between Rome and Cape Town, that they both had been addressing in Cape Town. By creating some mural artworks in Rome  both Skumbuzo and Jordan hope to reimagine the reality of what is present there. In addition to their social commentary, the artists have endeavoured to critique the juxtaposition between nature and urbanization: the kind of relationship the people in Rome have with their natural environments, and natural selves. The artists have observed there are ‘remnants of human artefacts in nature, nature is surviving in heavily built up spaces, nature it feels is versus the city, and humans are versus nature’. The artists explain: ‘Rome is like a big breasted mother who feeds the whole of Italy. All of Italy is in Rome, not just Romans. One can almost feel Rome struggling under the pressure’. IMAGINING REALITIES, investigates this reality too and gives scope to see the world re-examined and envisioned through Skumbuzo’s and Jordan’s synergistic discourse.

Emma Vandermerwe – Senior Curator Everard Read/CIRCA Cape Town

ARP – Art Residency Project ITALY/SOUTH AFRICA 6th EDITION: Elena Giustozzi, Caterina Silva, Jordan Sweke and Skumbuzo Vabaza are the winners

September 29, 2017

ARP-ART RESIDENCY PROJECT, designed by Centro di documentazione della ricerca artistica contemporanea Luigi Di Sarro, aims to promote and support emerging artistic talent in Italy and abroad and is part of a wider network of actions that Centro Di Sarro does through bilateral cultural exchanges in the field of visual arts. The programme has a contribution of MAECI, Italian Foreign Affaires Ministry, and the collaboration of Everard Read/CIRCA Gallery Cape Town.

ARP aims to promote mobility and knowledge of new cultural realities through the experimentation of materials, techniques and languages in contemporary art. The 6-weeks residency offers the opportunity for new creative experiences and technical and professional training, a human and artistic comparison, the study of the social, political and cultural history of the hosting country.

    from left: Caterina Silva, Jordan Sweke, Skumbuzo Vabaza, Elena Giustozzi

Who are the 6th Edition between Italy and South Africa 2017/18 four winners:

ELENA GIUSTOZZI was born in Civitanova Marche (MC, Italy) in 1983.
After the diploma at Science high school, she enrolled at the Academy of fine arts in Macerata, Italy, where in 2008/2009 she obtained a Bachelor degree in decoration. In 2011/2012 she ends the Master degree in painting. Since 2013 is teaching assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata: Painting Techniques (three years), Techniques and Technologies of Contemporary Visual Arts, Painting Techniques and Technologies Lab (Master degree course). Her selected project is Little Finite Landscapes. Different perspectives of landscape. “The perspective discloses to our eyes, not strained to the horizon like a parallel look to the ground, but cut and collected in a finite space. What do we look at? What are we listening to? The road that opens in front of us, the noise of our footsteps. My walks in the garden tell the story of the time that passes by, the seasons that follow one another, new but always the same, the earth that changes, transforms and deforms to then return to resemble every variation“.        www.elenagiustozzi.com

CATERINA SILVA (Rome, 1983) explores the links between power and language from often silent or pre-linguistic places in order to elude canonical structures of production of meaning. She studied sculpture in London (Camberwell College of Arts), philosophy and Scenography in Rome (La Sapienza, Ied). Her work ranges from painting to performance.  “I see my painting practice as a struggle with language and its classification’s systems. I use painting to probe at the obscure spaces of the mind, that which is impossible to explain in words but which exists and materializes into matter and then object. I create open images available to the interpretation of the observer, consequence of a process of deconstruction of my own internal superstructure carried out through the matter of painting itself and its translation into choreographic experiments and performances”. www.caterinasilva.com

 

JORDAN SWEKE (born 1991, Johannesburg. Lives and works in Cape Town) nel 2014 Bachelor and Honours in Fine Art, Specialising in Painting. Michaelis School of Fine Art. University of Cape Town, South Africa. Exploring and reflecting upon spatial perceptions within the natural world, Jordan Sweke aims to create “a marriage between the mathematical and the abstract, the geometric and the organic.” Working in a wide array of visual media including video, land art and urban installations, photography and oil paint on canvas, Sweke identifies each for its tactile emphasis of the material elements of his natural surroundings.The perceptions that result in his artworks transgress the usual prescribed concepts of the environment, and serve to challenge them. Fresh and uncompromising, his rendering ‘manages to reflect a Romantic beauty, a synthesis of life, death and the sublime’ and all serve to illustrate and redefine his audiences engagement and understanding of conceptual natural space.  www.jordansweke.com

 

SKUMBUZO VABAZA, popularly known as “Skubalisto” is a visual artist from Cape Town, South Africa. Skubalisto was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, (1987) where his parents had spent their twenties in exile. His mother was studying medicine and his father as an active member of the ANC. Who primarily creates portraits in a contemporary expressionist style, channeled through muralism, wood boards and canvas. His mediums range from spray paint, acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal and ink. Since his return to South Africa he has been touring on a quest to rediscover the landscape and a connection with his country through an artist’s eyes. “I am not a writer, painting is my weapon of choice. The makings of a true artist lie in the fact that an individual can create no matter what medium they use”.         skubalisto.tumblr.com

ARP-ART RESIDENCY PROJECT SHOWS AT CAPE TOWN ART FAIR

February 16, 2017

We are delighted to announce the arrival in Cape Town of Italian artist Valentina Colella, who was selected for a residency in the framework of ARP-Art Residency Project V Edition. The project, ideated by Centro Luigi Di Sarro of Rome in collaboration this year with Everard Read Gallery Cape Town, began in 2009 and involved various important galleries as well as 13 artists. This fifth edition enjoys the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Co-operation; in the period 2015-2017 the project’s activities increased, witnessing many young art enthusiasts as well as art students actively contributing to the residencies in Rome and Cape Town of the two winners of the selection, Valentina Colella for Italy and Zwelethu Machepha for South Africa. Young curators, art historians, photographers, videomakers and students of various disciplines collaborated with the two leaders of this exchange, the artists, through training contributions and the participation to meetings and workshops. It is because of this activity, considered of high cultural, educational and social value, that ARP project was invited this year to take part to Cape Town Art Fair in the Cultural Platforms section, next to the most important South African non-profit organisations.

We invite you to visit stand F13, where the artworks of all Italian and South African artists who took part until today to ARP project will be exhibited, and where it will be possible to find out more about all the events organized by ARP between now and the end of March.
Saturday 18th February from 11 until 3, artists Colella e Machepha will be at ARP’s stand to introduce themselves to CTAF visitors. At 2 pm, the Italian Consul in Cape Town, Antonio Tagliaferri, and the Director of the Italian Insitute of Culture of Pretoria, Anna Amendolagine, will be in conversation with the Project Director, Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, of Centro Luigi Di Sarro, about ARP project and its history. All artists and gallerists who took part to ARP exchanges in the last eight years have been invited to join and share their experiences.

The Illusion of Daedalus – Mary Cinque

September 5, 2016

Painting as a reinvented space, which loses its Newtonian definition, to rise as a thought, this is the subtitle of the show, curated by Massimo Bignardi, at the Centro Di Sarro from September 22nd to October 15th 2016.

opening: September 22nd, 6.00 pm

Mary Cinque was born in 1979 in Naples, where she lives and works. This is her first solo show in Rome and exhibits a series of medium and large paintings on canvas.

“As Merleau-Ponty wrote you can’t ‘do an exhaustive inventory of the visible’ and this is the assumption that pushes the painting, whether figurative or abstract, to celebrate the mystery of the ‘visibility’. For Mary Cinque, the city is the painting ideal accomplice in its fate to celebrate the enigma of visibility. This is very clear in this cycle of paintings dedicated to urban views, a recurring theme in her work, which she address to on canvas, paper or  wooden table depicting the dimension of space as well as the dimension of the place. Essentially the artist tears away from Daedalus, mythological guardian of the arts of architecture and sculpture, the illusory certainty of space assigning it to the timelessness of the image. She does it by reducing the volumes to flat color in which architecture, the whole city, loses its Newtonian definition to rise to an amalgam of time, memory and, thus,  future. Painting becomes in this sense another actual place, full of narrative value that is typical of those who try to tell the being in her own time”. (Massimo Bignardi)

Event organized during the Giornata del Comporaneo promoted by Amaci

        

 

Eva Macali – FACCIONI

June 12, 2016

curated by Roberto Gramiccia

opening: thursday 16 june 2016 6pm

(the show runs till 9 july)

 

FACCIONI, in italian means large faces, but also means the big poster on the road. So in this way, FACCIONI are images of women made object from advertising. The Eva Macali’s show offers an overturns of the hierarchical relationship between the observer and the observed. “One of my goals – says the artist – is that the women I represent can receive their subjectivity back. … My trial intervenes between the codes of modern painting, photography and the media; It is generally linked to the broader theme of the iconography “. Roberto Gramiccia writes in the text “I Faccioni, the looks, the question” that accompanies the exhibition: …  Eva Macali’s FACCIONI are in the tradition, but also outside of the traditional (…) made by an energetic gazelle post-pop, and that’s is also a natural anti-pop for an artist who has to dial with a Mediterranean culture. A culture that for thousands of years, rather than giving answers, he prefers to give questions. The same questions arising from the crossed eyes of FACCIONI showed at Centro Di Sarro. A question is in every glance. And in that question is the deeper meaning of life”.

 

 

ARP Project – The residence as a partecipative knowledge

May 25, 2016

It’s been three weeks now since the arrival of Zwelethu Machepha from Johannesburg to Rome and the beginning of his artistic residence in the capital.

“In the last few weeks in Rome I’ve considered myself graciously fortunate to have been exposed to the richness of this beautiful nation. I’ve seen the dramatic landscape, the history these monuments carry on are full of identity which is something hard to find where I come from” says Machepha, as he works to the opening on 31st May at Centro Luigi Di Sarro.

untitled ARP INSTAGRAM DIARY

These weeks were full, engaging and always busy. ARP – Art Residency Project provides the artists selected with a “daily encounter” with Rome both in its historical and archaeological aspect and in the contemporary one.Besides such monuments as the Forum, the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Ara Pacis, the encounter of Machepha with contemporary art and the Roman scene was “consumed” day after day through different studio visits and exhibition openings. The residence project, has been following by ARP Project team composed of young cultural workers with different roles: Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini, Angelica Farinelli and Giorgio Cristiano. The group has been constantly enriched with others artists and curators creating a dialogative and participatory atmosphere. That’s the case of Giulia Lopalco, who introduced the group at the printing/etching workshop “Stamperia del Tevere” created by Alessandro Fornaci where every weekend Machepha working on his plates. The study visits have brought us to Giuseppe Pietroniro and Marco Raparelli artists well known in the Italian contemporary art system, Giovanni De Cataldo and Leonardo Petrucci at Pastificio Cecere. Machepha had the chance also to confront with artists in residence at the various foreign academies such as Damien Duffy and Joseph Griffiths hosted during this time in Rome at the British Academy.

 

The openings to which Machepha participated were numerous, almost one a day. The solo of Vincenzo Schillaci at the Operativa gallery by Carlo Pratis, the collective show Studio System from artists in residence at America Academy, the exhibition of Camille Henrot at Memmo Foundation and the three nights so far organized by the independent space Q13 run by Carlo Caloro. Here, in an area like the Aurelio district far from any tourist tour guide, Machepha came into contact with several artists, especially with Stefan Nestoroski, Macedonian artist but with Italian training.

 

Many were also the visits to museums of which Rome such a the National Gallery of Modern Art, Macro museum for contemporary art and the Ethnographic Museum Luigi Pigorini. Among the works of public art, the group took part in a precious tour lead by Sara Spizzichino (image researcher, CO-Team Captain Shadow Puppets for the project Triumphs and Laments) to the monumental work of William Kentdrige on the Tiber banks, coincidentally another South African artist enchanted by Rome.