Jimmie Durham. Streets of Rome and Other Stories
Pascale Marthine Tayou. Secret Garden
November 29, 2012–February 10, 2013
Opening: November 28, 7pm
MACRO – The Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome
Via Nizza 138, Rome
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11–7pm; Saturday 11–10pm
MACRO is pleased to present two large exhibitions: Streets of Rome and Other Stories by American artist Jimmie Durham and Secret Garden by Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. Both exhibitions were curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi.
Streets of Rome and Other Stories isthe first large solo exhibition in an Italian public museum dedicated to Jimmie Durham, celebrating the long career of one of the world’s most recognized and established artists, characterized by a critical and political commitment.
The exhibition moves between installations, drawings and videos, and is meant to gather the artist’s most significant works from the past ten years. The aim is to also provide the public with a new and transversal look across his formal and critical poetic universe, in which objects and materials regain a primitive and pre-verbal strength, becoming symbols of a new cosmogony at the boundary between nature, technology and civilization.
Moving from reflection on the special and close relationship with Rome—where Durham lived for five years, from 2007 to 2012—and the important role the Capital has had in recent productions, the title of the exhibition is borrowed from the work La strada di Roma, presented in 2011 at MACRO Testaccio. The most important works that the artist created in those years will also be displayed, including: Templum: Il sacro, il profano ed altro (2007), Spring Fever (2010), Underground and Cloud Connections (2012).
Additionally, the artist will realize a large work created specifically for MACRO that will create a dialogue with some of his most recent works, illustrating his willingness to work with materials found in the area, like Carrara marble and various types of wood.
A series of installations that document his interest in art history and iconography complete the exhibition, including Deposizione (2006), Homage to Constantin Brancusi (2011), Arch de Triumph (Red) (2007) and Joe Hill Painting (2002).
For his solo exhibition at MACRO, Pascale Marthine Tayou, who is among the most significant characters in the international contemporary art scene, will work in situ and in close connection with the exhibition spaces dedicated to the magic of space, suggestive light and architectural forms of the museum, taking advantage of the height and unique extension of the Sala Enel.
There will be the installation The Magic Calabash, made of an enormous quantity of suspended pumpkins, and Black Diamond, an installation in which iron structures in diamond form hang from above in a new arrangement conceived specifically for the museum. Completing the exhibition are works realized for the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, such as the sculpture series “Poupées Pascale” dressed in chocolate,”Sauveteur Vendor” and “Masques” carried out in crystal and various materials. All of the works give a platform to the Western conception of African exoticism that is full of energy and vitality, but is also complex and contradictory.
The artist’s work, as his name written in the feminine form delineates, is deliberately heterogeneous and indefinable, elusive in respect to predetermined patterns. The definition of Tayou’s poetic process hangs between the eccentric and colorful story of everyday life and the necessity to mix human characteristics and geographies, cultures and situations, which are not easy to identify.
