Paola Pivi
Share, But It’s Not Fair
7 July–9 September 2012
Rockbund Art Museum
20 Huqiu Road
Huangpu District
Shanghai, China
Share, But It’s Not Fair, curated by Larys Frogier, Director of Rockbund Art Museum, is Italian artist Paola Pivi’s first solo exhibition in China. Born in Italy in 1971, Paola Pivi has received worldwide acclaim for her highly impactful works, astonishing in their simplicity.
Paola Pivi’s works are the outcome of weird yet extremely precise, cogent orderings of things: representations are striking in terms not only of their shape, color, and lighting, but above all by their capacity to assert themselves as lightning-like intrusions into reality—with no narrative gambit, no symbolic justifications, and no metaphorical or allegorical convolutions. In other words, the art of Paola Pivi systematically gambles on images with the power to be more real than any other reality. Or to put it another way: the image is fantasy within reality.
Paola Pivi’s solo show at Rockbund Art Museum presents three impressive installations; one large outdoor drawing on billboard; and a selection of photograph, pearl painting, and lamps, which offer original and critical views on formatted topics about our contemporary world. Criticality in Pivi’s work does not come out from a direct sociological or political attitude but it is powerfully activated through the permanent question of how picture has the power to subvert what we name reality—society, gender, and cultural identity—into an alienated space for representation.
To exhibit Paola Pivi’s work into an Asian and Chinese art context is also particularly relevant because her images are always asking for more demanding articulation between images and social content. In an art context where the majority of the artists are rushing into social topics, Pivi’s strategy is radically different: it is the intrusion of an anomalistic image into the social sphere which will overturn reality into new representations and will offer the visitor to experience a creative criticality.
About Rockbund Art Museum
Located at the famous Bund area in Shanghai, and echoing to its building’s historical heritage as the first modern museum in China, Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) is involved towards the construction, consolidation, influence and sustainability of an innovative organization strongly engaged to promote high quality projects in the international contemporary art scene. Since its inauguration in 2010, the museum has launched exhibitions of internationally acclaimed artists and curators Cai Guoqiang, Zeng Fanzhi, Hou Hanru, Fumio Nanjo, among others. In addition, the museum has organized more than 150 educational events and projects open free to the public. By doing so, RAM seeks to build solid cultural networking with local and international partnerships leading to innovative cooperation projects against the global era with the decisive economic and cultural transformations. In the future, the museum would stick to establishing and sharing the expanded territories for art, knowledge, creativity in China and abroad, by which means to foster circulation of ideas, works of art, and people (artists, researchers, curators, mediators), to identify, invest in, and disseminate emergent and cross-disciplinary art movements at international level, and finally to think through and share art’s social implications. RAM also explores the possibility of the museums’ sustainability in the today’s cultural and social context; and hope to contribute to the establishment of the institutional structure and environment of contemporary art museums in China. For more information on RAM, please visit www.rockbundartmuseum.org.
