VANESSA BEECROFT. PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS
curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio
ELDORADO.
JORDAN WOLFSON. OPTICAL SOUND
curated by Alessandro Rabottini
9 MA-29 JULY 2007
Opening:
TUESDAY 8 MAY 2007 at 6.30 pm
GAMeC, Bergamo
On 8th May GAMeC will present a solo show dedicated to Vanessa Beecroft and a Jordan Wolfson exhibition, part of Eldorado series GAMeC conceived for the most exciting international emerging artists.
Vanessa Beecroft. Paintings and drawings
At GAMeC Galleria dArte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Vanessa Beecrofts painted work will be the subject of a solo show for the first time at international level. The exhibition, curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, will offer visitors an exhaustive look at a particular aspect of Beecrofts output, and provides a unique chance to emphasise the pictorial and figurative roots that have been fundamental since the start of her career but often little known by the public at large.
The solo show will occupy four rooms on the second floor of the museum and include approximately 350 drawings, 30 medium-sized oil portraits, and more than 20 large canvases of which two are from the early 1990s and 14 have been specially painted for the exhibition at GAMeC.
Vanessa Beecroft is known internationally for her performances and for photographs of semi-nude and immobile women in the spaces of some of the most important museums and galleries in the world. Taking the female condition as her field of investigation and using the female body as her material, Beecroft tackles some of the most controversial aspects of contemporary culture and society, for example, the relationship between food and sexuality, and societys obsession with beauty and physical appearance. Her work draws on sculpture, painting, photography, cinema and theatre.
So all her work originates in drawing and painting. In her famous tableaux vivants, her characters are dressed and set out in a manner that is clearly related to pictorial language. At the same time their clothes and hairstyles may be inspired by the metaphysical world of Giorgio de Chirico, the art of antiquity, Italian and Flemish Renaissance or the Pre-Raphaelites painting. In turn, Vanessa Beecrofts painting has its raison dêtre in expressionist modern drawing, in Egon Schieles bodies marked by desire or neurosis, or in the synthesis of Matisses line-drawing which she expresses in her own artistic language.
The exhibition will examine one of the least known aspects of Vanessa Beecrofts output: it is both intimate and private, yet it is also fundamental to her work in general.
The show will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Electa (Milan), with a text by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio. The catalogue will discuss Beecroft’s painting exhaustively, not just the works on show, but almost all the paintings and drawings that the artist has produced till the present day.
ELDORADO
JORDAN WOLFSON. OPTICAL SOUND
GAMeC presents the first solo show in a public institution in Italy by the American artist Jordan Wolfson. For the occasion the artist has conceived an exhibition, curated by Alessandro Rabottini, comprised of three recent works, culminating in Landscape for Fire, a new video work commissioned and produced by GAMeC.
The work of Jordan Wolfson ranges in video, photography, and environmental and sound installations. Using various tools and means, the artists array of themes and atmospheres is evoked with great freedom, bringing together myths and pop culture, references to conceptual art and the poetry of our everyday experiences.
The three works in the exhibition represent chapters in a story made up of pauses and enigmas, and featuring themes dear to Wolfson, such as time, language, memory and absence.
Both the 16 mm film Forest from Above in Reverse and the sound installation appeal to the sensibilities of the observer in our capacity as consumers of entertainment and, through the isolation of elements typical of cinematic narration (sound in the first case and movement of the camera in the second), stimulate a gentle choreography of suspense, irony and imagination. In both works, nature is the desolate, minimal setting for an obvious mise-en-scène, one that always calls into question art, suggestion and the construction of images as artifice, convention and a linguistic game. The complexity of the artists personal relationship with the history of recent art lies at the centre of the third work Landscape for Fire. Its a video that has grown out of a film made in 1972 by the English artist Anthony McCall titled Landscape for Fire. The film was McCalls first attempt to integrate performance, installation, sculpture and images in movement. Thirty years on, Wolfson produced a cover and by an extreme use of citation and appropriation, he realized a work in which nostalgia and the past are interwoven with a reflection on the nature of artistic creation. He stages a work of the past as though it were a ritual, the repetition of which invokes the almost mystical aura that surrounds many of the visual works of Conceptual, Land and Performance art from the early 1970s.
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