Carlotta Pesce con Mario CristianiCarlotta Pesce with Mario Cristiani
Encounter with Galleria Continua,
San Gimignano / Bejing / Le Moulin
October 2011 – January 2012
Carlotta Pesce is pleased to present a selection of artists represented by Galleria Continua, in her Studio in via D’Azeglio 42, Bologna. The exhibition is a new appointment with an internationally renown contemporary art gallery and continues the series of Encounters, inaugurated in 2010 with the Lia Rumma Gallery Naples, Milan and in 2011 with Giò Marconi, Milan.
Galleria Continua was founded in San Gimignano in 1990 by three friends: Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo. It occupies an evocative space situated in what was a 1950’s cinema, and is one of the most important internationally recognised contemporary art centres in Italy. In 2004 Galleria Continua was one of the first Western galleries to inaugurate a new space in 798 Art District, the artistic district of Bejing, to promote international contemporary art where it was previously not very visible. In 2007 Galleria Continua founded Le Moulin, at Boissy-le-Chatel, in the Parisian countryside, by turning a disused factory into a unique space of over 10,000 m² dedicated to contemporary creation.
The exhibition Encounter with Galleria Continua presents the works of four renowned artists who have been internationally affirmed by exhibitions in prestigious Museums and public institutions, and continues the investigation of international artists born between the 60’s and 70’s which started with the exhibition Around Forty (Studio Carlotta Pesce, April–May 2011).
LORIS CECCHINI
Born in Milan in 1969. He lives and works in Tuscany and Berlin.
In Loris Cecchini’s work photography, design, sculpture and installations are based on unitary poetics where familiar forms from everyday life are transferred in altered vision which challenges the viewer’s perception. The artist photographs actual sets built with models. Using subtle, digital processing he superimposes scraps of reality on virtual physical scenes rebuilt with models in his studio, creating various situations between the plausible and the paradoxical.
Of all the Italian artists who have affirmed themselves over the last decade, Loris Cecchini is one of the most appreciated by national and international critics. He has held personal exhibitions in prominent museums such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2004, 2006 and 2007), the Shanghai Duolun MoMA (2006), the PS1 in New York (2006), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, Saint-Etienne (2010). He has taken part in esteemed exhibitions including the 49th Venice Biennial (2001), Premio per la giovane arte italiana 2004-2005 – Padiglione Venezia at the Venice Biennial (2005), the VI Shanghai Biennial (2006), Artempo a Palazzo Fortuny in Venice (2007), Forward>>Looking, MACRO FUTURE, Rome, Antroposfera, nuove forme della vita, Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna (2010).
SABRINA MEZZAQUI
Born in Bologna in 1964, she lives and works in Marzabotto, Bologna.
Literature is the chosen subject for Sabrina Mezzaqui’s artistic research. The experience of reading, intended as a path of learning and maturing, and as an inexhaustible source of knowledge, is the basis of the artist’s creative process. Passing simultaneously through different languages – figurative art and literature – brings to life real visual poems where the written word and images are harmoniously united. Each work of art is the fruit of slow, patient, meticulous labour, and aims to be the image of the time taken to create it.
Sabrina Mezzaqui is one of the most interesting figures on the Italian contemporary art scene, and has presented her work in the last decade in important exhibitions and public spaces in Italy (including MART in Rovereto, 2007 and 2010; the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, 2010; the Venice Biennial of Architecture, 2008; 15th Quadrennial of Art in Rome, 2008, MAXXI, Rome, 2007, Artempo at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2007; GAM in Turin, 2006; the Gallery of Modern Art Bologna, 2005; MAN Nuoro, 2005; Castel Sant’Elmo, Naples, 2007) and abroad (includingl PS1, New York, the Museé Saint Etienne Métropole, 2008, the Italian Institute of Cultutre, MOCA, Buenos Aires, 2009).
HANS OP DE BEECK
Born in 1969 in Turnhout, Belgium, he lives and works in Brussels.
Hans Op de Beeck’s research embraces various media, from sculpture to installations, from video to animated film, from photography to drawings, painting, writing (short stories)and sometimes even composing the music which accompanies his videos (as in the case of the jazz song “Sea of Tranquillity”). The artist builds and stage manages surreal worlds, suspended between past and future, reality and fiction, in a dreamlike dimension without space or time which lead the spectator in an intimate reflection of the human condition, the tragic-comic absurdity of existence. A thread of melancholy seems to run through the artist’s entire production, as does a certain romantic flavour encoded in the filming of some stereotypes of the romanticism that Op de Beeck reintroduces as current values.
Hans Op de Beeck is one of the front-line figures in the international art’s scene, present at the biennials in Shanghai in 2006 and in Singapore in 2008 and among the protagonists of the section Art Unlimited in Art Basel in 2004, 2009 and 2011 and the collection In-Finitum, at Palazzo Fortuny in 2009 andl 2011. Op de Beeck has taken part in numerous personal and collective international exhibitions over the last decade: from Smithsonian’s Hirshorn Museum in Washington D.C. to Palais de Tokyo in Paris; from the Pompidou Centre in Paris to Reina Sofia in Madrid; from the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, to the S.M.A.K., Ghent, to P.S.1, New York.
SOPHIE WHETTNALL
Sophie Whettnall was born in Brussels in 1973. She lives and works in Brussels.
Since the end of the ’90s the artist’s work has developed following two central themes that, despite the use of new expressive means, are derived from the tradition of painting: self-portrait and landscape. The video camera is the instrument she uses to document her voyages, to tell her story, and to film landscapes that she transforms into emotional landscapes. Her nomadic existence contributed to the expressive means she uses. Unlike paintings, video allows her to work efficiently during the journey. Her works – video, photography, multimedial installations – are expressions of autobiography remaining constantly suspended between realism and abstraction, and between representation of reality and creation, between movement and the static state.
Over the last decade Sophie Whettnall has attracted the attention of international public and critics. She has presented her works at prestigious international events, including the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007) and The World Expo of Shanghai 2010, Belgian Pavilion. Sophie Whettnall has held personal showings in esteemed museum spaces including: Casa de Velazquez, Madrid, Spain and “Contemporary Creations and Experimentation Space”, Santiago de Compostela in 2006; Miro Foundation, Barcellona, Spain and the Utah Museum of Fine Art, UMFA , Utah, USA in 2010.