Marc Trujillo: American Purgatory / Riccarda de Eccher: Montagna

Robert Storr lecture: September 14, 7–8pm
Artist and scholar, Robert Storr: “What Happened to the American Scene? Realism since 1980,” Recital Hall, Simons Center for the Arts, 54 St. Philip Street, Charleston. 

Marc Trujillo artist talk: September 16, 2–3pm
In conversation with Robert Storr 

Halsey Talks: September 18, 6:30–8pm 
The Landscape as Art: What is the relationship between landscape and art? 

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston opens its 2017–18 season with two solo exhibitions, Marc Trujillo: American Purgatory and Riccarda de Eccher: Montagna. The exhibitions will be on view from August 25 to October 7, 2017.

American Purgatory
The paintings of Marc Trujillo portray quotidian scenes: fast-food restaurants, big-box store aisles, long terminal corridors of airports, and so on. The scenes are remarkably unremarkable. In their ubiquitous nature, the paintings present an anti-place: scenes that refer not to a specific place, but to uncannily similar tableaus that unfold every day in communities across America. While Trujillo models his paintings after specific locations, usually in the Los Angeles area, his scenes appear strikingly similar to viewers’ own relationships with local commerce. His paintings critique a hallmark of modern capitalism: one that aims to recreate identical commercial experiences across the country. With the title American Purgatory, Trujillo’s exhibition presents a body of work in which each painting locates a place that is not a place.

Montagna
On view simultaneously with Marc Trujillo’s exhibition, Riccarda de Eccher’s sublime watercolors of mountain peaks also explore familiar scenes. In this case, her works evoke picturesque representations of snow-capped mountains from the Italian Alps. De Eccher’s watercolors offer a subversion of our current age in which images are vastly and readily shared online, especially those that are high-resolution and digitally retouched. In a way, they correlate with Trujillo’s paintings: though titled, her pictures are cropped as to present anonymous mountains that could exist on almost any continent. As an Italian native and frequent mountain climber, de Eccher uses her works to explore humanity’s relationship with mountains throughout history.

About Marc Trujillo
Marc Trujillo is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently resides in Los Angeles. He received his BA from the University of Texas at Austin and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art, where he received the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize as well as the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Trust Fellowship. In 2001, Trujillo received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and in 2008 he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been featured in exhibitions around the United States and currently shows with Hirschl + Adler Modern in New York and Chris Winfield Gallery in Carmel, CA. His work is in numerous public and private collections including the Long Beach Museum, Long Beach, CA; and the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, CT. 

About Riccarda de Eccher
Riccarda de Eccher was born in Bolzano and grew up in Udine, Italy. Her work has been featured at the Casa Cavazzini Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Udine, Italy; Galleria d’Arte Moderna Enrico de Cillia, Treppo Carnico, Italy; Gallery ArtCube, Paris, France; and the Sala delle Esposizioni, Bolzano, Italy, among others. She lives and works in Long Island, New York.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston provides a multidisciplinary laboratory for the production, presentation, interpretation, and dissemination of ideas by innovative visual artists from around the world. As a non-collecting museum, we create meaningful interactions between adventurous artists and diverse communities within a context that emphasizes the historical, social, and cultural importance of the art of our time.