NOt here

NOt here

Works by: Ruben Aubrecht, Maria Anwander, Alessandro Imbriaco, Veronica Raimo. Curated by Raffaele Bedarida

 

Download Floor Plan: not here floor plan

Works:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alessandro Imbriaco and Veronica
Raimo, Static Drama, 2010, five
photographs: 19.7 x 27.6 inch each; fifty
postcards: 4 x 6 inch each.

Ruben Aubrecht,The Sublation of Space,
2010, interactive web-based installation,
variable size.

 

Maria Anwander, The Kiss,
documentation of a performance held at
MoMA, New York, 2010, photograph: 17
x 22 inch; museum label: 12 x 16 inch;
video.

 
——-

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

NOt here

Works by: Ruben Aubrecht, Maria Anwander, Alessandro Imbriaco, Veronica Raimo. Curated by Raffaele Bedarida

 

Opening: December 8th, 6:30 – 9:00 pm

By appointment: December 9 – 23, 2010

HSF by Montrasioarte,

128 W 121st Street, New York, NY 10027

Subway 2,3 to 116th Street

www.harlemstudiony.org

info@harlemstudiony.org

phone: 646 542 9986

 

Are you there? Can you see me? Really?

(Skype Conversation, November 2010)

The artist might be present, the artwork could be elsewhere, the beholder should be here. NOt here is a reflection on a paradoxical phenomenology of absence in the era of virtual ubiquity. NOt here, features HSF artists in residence Ruben Aubrecht, Maria Anwander, Alessandro Imbriaco, and Veronica Raimo. Curated by Raffaele Bedarida, NOt here presents works realized by the four artists during their stay in New York (September – December 2010).

 

Ruben Aubrecht activates short circuits between means of communication, their contents, and contexts. At HSF, he exhibits an internet-based piece entitled The Sublation of Space: a webcam live-streams the video of a light bulb and wall located in a room of HSF (128 W 121st Street, Harlem, New York). For the duration of the show, anyone with internet access can see the light bulb in real time and switch it on at this link: www.rubenaubrecht.net/new_york.html. By turning the light on you will read a note on the wall, which describes what you have just done. Then, a timer will switch the light off again. The Sublation of Space parodies the basic feeling of presence and satisfaction given by interactive works – here you are able to illuminate a real house in Manhattan, interfere with the life of its inhabitants, and alter, somehow, the most famous urban night view in the world.

Born in Austria in 1980, Aubrecht received an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with a degree in Computer and Videoart in 2006. He has exhibited in the US and in several countries throughout Europe including Germany, Italy, Spain, Great Britain and Sweden.  http://www.rubenaubrecht.net

Maria Anwander is a multimedia artist. She uses art institutions as forums where hierarchical, social, and economic models can be tested and reimagined. At NOt here, she presents The Kiss. The piece is part of a series of artworks and performances, which Anwander has developed since 2004, playing with the link between art institutions and market. The Kiss was given to the Museum of Modern Art  (MoMA) in New York without asking for permission. Anwander entered the museum as a regular visitor and gave an intense French kiss to the wall. Next to the invisible mark of her mouth she fixed a fake label, which simulated the style of a regular MoMA caption, including this text. Kissing in some cultures and religions symbolizes the exchange of souls and powers.

Born in Austria in 1980, Anwander received an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with a degree in Sculpture, Performance and Media art (2008). She has exhibited in several European countries, in Australia, and the United States. www.maria-anwander.net

 

Static Drama is a shared project by Alessandro Imbriaco (images) and Veronica Raimo (texts). In a series of photographs, Imbriaco portrays six private backyards at dusk. Painstakingly staged and theatrically lit, these images emphasize the out-of-time quality of twilight’s darker phase. The deserted backyards are only populated by the traces of their inhabitants’ lives. Observed as literary topoi, the environments are represented as archetypal stages of possible domestic dramas. The image of a seventh backyard is turned into a postcard – printed in fifty copies. Available for visitors to take (and mail), the postcards’ backs bear Raimo’s handwritten messages. Fragmentary notes from elsewhere, the texts are simultaneously intimate and distant. Things seem to be happening and involving the writer. But, similarly to Imbriaco’s images, it is the very act of representation through language to create a filter and inevitably instill a sense of distance.

Born in Salerno (Italy) in 1980, Imbriaco currently lives in Rome. He won the 2008 Canon Award for Young Photographers and the 2010 World Press Photo prize. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Europe and widely published in major Italian magazines – such as L’Espresso, Internazionale, Abitare, Io Donna, D di Repubblica. His work is currently distributed by the photographic agency Contrasto. http://www.alessandroimbriaco.com/home.html

Born in Rome in 1978, Raimo graduated in Literature at “La Sapienza” University in Rome and in Cinema Criticism at “Humboldt” University in Berlin. Her first novel, “Il dolore secondo Matteo” was released by the publisher Minimum Fax in 2007. Her poems are collected in the anthology “Fuori dal cielo” (Rome: Empiria, 2007). A second novel is forthcoming with Rizzoli. Raimo contributes regularly to the magazine Rolling Stone Italia and works as a translator for several publishers in Italy.

 

(RB, New York, 2010)

NOt here

Please join us at HSF by Montrasioarte for the opening of

NOt here

Works by:

Ruben Aubrecht

Maria Anwander

Alessandro Imbriaco

Veronica Raimo

Curated by Raffaele Bedarida

Opening: December 8th, 6:30 – 9:00 pm

By appointment: December 9 – 23, 2010

HSF by Montrasioarte,

128 W 121st Street, New York, NY 10027

Subway 2,3 to 116th Street

http://www.harlemstudiony.orgv

info@harlemstudiony.org

phone: 646 542 9986

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are you there? Can you see me? Really?

(Skype Conversation, November 2010)

The artist might be present, the artwork could be elsewhere, the beholder should be here. NOt here is a reflection on a paradoxical phenomenology of absence in the era of virtual ubiquity. NOt here, features HSF artists in residence Ruben Aubrecht, Maria Anwander, Alessandro Imbriaco, and Veronica Raimo. Curated by Raffaele Bedarida, NOt here presents works realized by the four artists during their stay in New York (September – December 2010).

Ruben Aubrecht activates short circuits between means of communication, their contents and contexts. At HSF, he exhibits an internet-based piece entitled The Sublation of Space: a webcam live-streams the video of a light bulb and wall located in a room of HSF (128 W 121st Street, Harlem, New York). For the duration of the show, anyone with internet access can see the light bulb in real time and switch it on at this link: http://www.rubenaubrecht.net/new_york.html. By turning the light on you will read a note on the wall, which describes what you have just done. Then, a timer will switch the light off after 15 seconds. The Sublation of Space parodies the basic feeling of presence and satisfaction given by interactive works – here you are able to illuminate a real house in Manhattan, interfere with the life of its inhabitants, and alter, somehow, the most famous urban night view in the world.

Born in Austria in 1980, Aubrecht received an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with a degree in Computer and Videoart in 2006. He has exhibited in the US and in several countries throughout Europe including Germany, Italy, Spain, Great Britain and Sweden. http://www.rubenaubrecht.net

Maria Anwander is a multimedia artist. She uses art institutions as forums where hierarchical, social, and economic models can be tested and reimagined. At NOt here, she presents The Kiss. The piece is part of a series of artworks and performances, which Anwander has developed since 2004, playing with the link between art institutions and market. The Kiss was given to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York without asking for permission. Anwander entered the museum as a regular visitor and gave an intense French kiss to the wall. Next to the invisible mark of her mouth she fixed a fake label, which simulated the style of a regular MoMA caption, including this text. Kissing in some cultures and religions symbolizes the exchange of souls and powers.

Born in Austria in 1980, Anwander received an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with a degree in Sculpture, Performance and Media art (2008). She has exhibited in several European countries, in Australia, and the United States. http://www.maria-anwander.net

Static Drama is a shared project by Alessandro Imbriaco (images) and Veronica Raimo (texts). In a series of photographs, Imbriaco portrays five private backyards at dusk. Painstakingly staged and theatrically lit, these images emphasize the out-of-time quality of twilight’s darker phase. The deserted backyards are only populated by the traces of their inhabitants’ lives. Observed as literary topoi, the environments are represented as archetypal stages of possible domestic dramas. The image of a sixth backyard is turned into a postcard – printed in fifty copies. Available for visitors to take (and mail), the postcards’ backs bear Raimo’s handwritten messages. Fragmentary notes from elsewhere, the texts are simultaneously intimate and distant. Things seem to be happening and involving the writer. But, similarly to Imbriaco’s images, it is the very act of representation through language to create a filter and inevitably instill a sense of distance.

Born in Salerno (Italy) in 1980, Imbriaco currently lives in Rome. He won the 2008 Canon Award for Young Photographers and the 2010 World Press Photo prize. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Europe and widely published in major Italian magazines – such as L’Espresso, Internazionale, Abitare, Io Donna, D di Repubblica. His work is currently distributed by the photographic agency Contrasto. http://www.alessandroimbriaco.com/home.html

Born in Rome in 1978, Raimo graduated in Literature at “La Sapienza” University in Rome and in Cinema Criticism at “Humboldt” University in Berlin. Her first novel, “Il dolore secondo Matteo” was released by the publisher Minimum Fax in 2007. Her poems are collected in the anthology “Fuori dal cielo” (Rome: Empiria, 2007). A second novel is forthcoming with Rizzoli. Raimo contributes regularly to the magazine Rolling Stone Italia and works as a translator for several publishers in Italy.

Avital Cnaani: STRANGLER FIG – Fumitaka Kudo: Living Fossils

DOWNLOAD EXHIBITION FLOOR PLAN HERE: Avital-Fumitaka floor plan

Avital-Fumitaka floor plan

all photographs: © 2010 Susanna Pozzoli. All rights reserved.

Avital Cnaani – Fumitaka Kudo

Please join us at HSF by Montrasioarte for the opening of the twin shows featuring artists in residence,

Avital Cnaani (sculpture, Israel) and Fumitaka Kudo (drawing, Japan).

Curated by Raffaele Bedarida and Teresa Meucci, the show presents works achieved

by the two artists during their stay in New York (March – June 2010).

Opening reception:

June 3rd, 6.00-9.00 pm

By appointment:

June 4 – 24, 2010

HSF by Montrasioarte

128W 121st street

Subway 2, 3 to 116th street

http://www.harlemstudiony.org

646 542 9986

Avital Cnaani

STRANGLER FIG

Avital Cnaani explores a territory between body and geography

through works that merge the boundaries of drawing and sculpture.

Geographic and anatomic sites are evoked such as caves, mountains,

hair or ears, through metonymic and ambiguous allusions.

At HSF, she presents a series of drawings and three site-specific sculptures.

Her drawings are deeply plastic, tectonic. The fragile sculptures feel like spatial drawings

which link the architectural container of the exhibition-space’s walls and ceilings to the

contained space where you are standing and the air that you are breathing. Their link is

the bodily space of sensation stimulated through the use of a diversity of materials and textures.

Fumitaka Kudo

LIVING FOSSILS

When fish fossils found on mountains were believed to be

evidence for the Biblical Flood, Leonardo da Vinci proposed that

they were actually remains of organisms that had lived before

mountains were raised. A theory very close to that of modern paleontology.

During the last three months at HSF, Fumitaka Kudo drew a series of small and large scale

works on paper with the painstakingly technique of Leonardo’s drawings.

But his studies are visualizing with scientific precision large, impossible creatures, which could have

only swum in the depths of Flood’s waters. The intricate web of signs that compose the fish’s epidermis

is the product of a repetitive gesture and constitute a diagram of manual fatigue. The little, inexpressive eye is

the only opening through this crust.

SUSPENDED: Lee Hoin – Giuseppe Buffoli

Please join us at HSF by Montrasioarte for the opening of Suspended, the eleventh group exhibition of artists-in-residence since the program’s foundation in 2007. Suspended includes works by: Lee Hoin (Korea) and Giuseppe Buffoli (Italy).
Curated by Raffaele Bedarida, the show presents works achieved by the two artists during their stay in New York (December 2009 – January 2010).

SUSPENDED

LEE HOIN

GIUSEPPE BUFFOLI

Curated by Raffaele Bedarida

Opening reception:
January 21st  6.00-9.00 pm

By appointment:
January 21 – February 4, 2010

HSF by Montrasioarte
128W 121st street
Subway 2, 3 to 116th street

www.harlemstudiony.org

Lee Hoin exhibits a series of small-scale, oil works on paper. Night skies are observed through a black web of tree branches. But we are not in the woods; we are in Manhattan. And you don’t even need to go to Central Park: from the right angle, any flowerbed tree will be good enogh to create that visual effect. In New York at night, the sky and the clouds are beautifully lit from below, and the stars are substituted by the pulsing and colorful constellations of the airplanes that constantly cross its firmament. The artist’s reflection on nature and artifice, their contemplation and cliches of representation is also a subtle redefinition of the relationship painting-experience-memory. Hoin presence at HSF is part of an artist-exchange program between HSF by Montrasioarte (New York, USA) and Mongin Art Center (Seoul, Korea).

Giuseppe Buffoli creates precarious structures made out of found objects. Suspended in his room at HSF, the artist reconstructed a small version of Leonardo da Vinci’s utopian self-supporting bridge (late 1480s), a wooden arch that holds itself together without any fasteners or connectors. The bridge’s own weight keeps it together; the more you stack on it, the more stable it gets. In the exhibition, Buffoli presents the documentation of its demolition by simply pulling its key-stone. The documents are: the destroyed bridge, oil-paint traces on a large paper sheet where the wooden beams fell, the photographs of the the collapse’s different phases and a series of ink drawings that painstakingly reproduce those photographs. Disolcated throughout the rooms of HSF building, these objects and images are discovered by visitors as many traces of the original event. The nature and reliability of the visual document as index and the problem of documenting performative art practices are challenged by Buffoli.

io.

Please join us at HSF for the opening of io., the tenth group exhibition of artists-in-residence since the program’s foundation in 2007. io. presents works by: Doojin Ahn (Korea), Valerio Ricci (Italy), and Larissa Voltz (Germany-Israel).
Co-curated by HSF Chief Curator, Raffaele Bedarida with Junior Curator, Teresa Meucci, the show presents works achieved by the three artists during their stay in New York (August-November-2009).

IO.

DOOJIN AHN

VALERIO RICCI

LARISSA VOLTZ

Curated by: Raffaele Bedarida and Teresa Meucci

Opening reception:
November 2nd  6.00-9.00 pm

By appointment:
November 3 – 30, 2009

HSF by Montrasioarte
128W 121st street
Subway 2, 3 to 116th street

http://www.harlemstudiony.org

Doojin Ahn exhibits Just Caves, an installation consisting of a ring (circum. 239 inches) suspended at the center of a room. The exterior of the circle is covered with a painted frieze, depicting an uninterrupted series of caves. An archetype of wilderness, the cave is turned into an elementary narrative unit for a pre-human (or post-human) mythology. The deserted landscape is painted as visionary comics, but there is no narrative development in it. Deprived of the visual omnipotence given by a two-dimensional painting, the viewer uselessly walks around looking for an event to take place in the reverted panorama. Ahn is the first artist to participate in the HSF-Mongin Exchange Program, a collaboration between HSF and Mongin Art Space in Seoul.

 

Valerio Ricci’s Storage is an installation composed of 204 hand-made bricks, shaped, painted, and cooked by the artist during his three-month stay at HSF. They cover most of the floor’s surface in a room, leaving only a perimetric passageway free. Ordered in an extensive grid, their yellow-glazed ceramic shines as a carpet of gold bullions. Throughout the show, HSF visitors are invited to take home the bricks. Each brick is initialed, dated and numbered on the bottom; each guest can have a brick by filling out a form with his/her contacts and the number of the brick. The artist will therefore be able to send out certificates of authenticity; the owners will become part of a virtual community that would potentially re-unite the pieces. The progressive dismantling of Storage will be documented by a video. The work reverts historical minimalist and participation art practices, and reflects on the paradigmatic artisanal-alchemic nature of art making: it creates a paradoxical short-circuit between the value of things and that of experience, investments of time and real estate. Where will you put a glazed brick (it’s free!) in your mini New York apt.?

Larissa Voltz works on language, expressions, their resonances with different architectural spaces and human environments, and the potentials of their multi-layered meanings. At io., she exhibits two paintings, Je te dérange? 1 and Je te dérange? 2. Their large size (85.4 x 129.5 inches), designed to fill the wall surface of the exhibition space, gives these works on paper a mural-like power to dialogue with HSF non-neutral architecture. More than a dialogue it is actually a clash. The sober, monumental letters of a lapidary text is surrounded by century-old wooden decorations and stucco works. “Am I disturbing you?”, the text repeats several times in French from the two sides of the room (Voltz is German, she lives in Israel, and made this work in New York in the context of an institution where Italian is the second-most frequently spoken language): in Je te dérange? 2, the letters are painted with oil-based Blockprinting colors on black paper; facing it, the same words are traced in negative, where the masking film is cut. Voltz’s artisanal technique was traditionally used to paint texts for advertising and shop signs: cut by hand out of a masking film, the letters were then stenciled on a wall or board. In a room, the words are monumental and aggressive, and the industrial-like letters reveal their textured colors and beautiful vibrations.

(Raffaele Bedarida, New York, October 2009)

ABOUT US
Harlem Studio Fellowship is a privately funded, non-profit Residency Program for international artists founded in 2007 by Ruggero Montrasio and curated by Raffaele Bedarida.
Harlem Studio Fellowship is designed to encourage the creative, intellectual and personal growth of emerging visual artists. We invite two or three young artists every three months, providing them with housing and studio in a townhouse in the district of Harlem. Every residency ends with a group exhibition, displaying works and projects accomplished by each artist during his/her stay in New York In addition to this, a complete show of the artists in residence will be held at the end of the first 3 years, displaying a selection from the works produced at HSF.

LOVISA RINGBORG – ELENA ASCARI

Please join us at HSF for the opening of a double solo exhibition of artists-in-residence, Lovisa Ringborg and Elena Ascari. Co-curated by HSF Chief Curator, Raffaele Bedarida with newly appointed Junior Curator, Teresa Meucci, the show presents works achieved by the two artists during their stay in New York (May-July-2009).

– LOVISA RINGBORG
if your secret was an animal
what animal would it be

– ELENA ASCARI
Cells

Curated by: Raffaele Bedarida and Teresa Meucci

Opening reception:
July 16th 6.30-9.00 pm

By appointment:
July 17th-31st, 2009

HSF by Montrasioarte
128W 121st street
Subway 2, 3 to 116th street

LOVISA RINGBORG
if your secret was an animal
what animal would it be

Swedish artist Lovisa Ringborg exhibits at HSF two interrelated works. A photograph, Insomnia is the visual and conceptual counterpart of an environmental piece, If Your Secret Was an Animal What Animal Would It Be, which consists of four photographs and a mirror text. More than doing photographs, Ringborg literally works with photography: her initial photographic shots, used as “raw material” (the artist’s words), are digitally altered and combined into carefully composed and theatrically staged images. As with Caravaggio (a rough mattress hardly visible under classical draperies), the fictionality of the represented scene is revealed in her work, and the masquerade in the artist’s studio emerges interfering with the subject matter. Subtle visual inconsistencies insinuate unreliability in the faux staged-photographs and add surreal echoes to their content. But there is no attempt on shocking effects: no juxtaposition of evidently incongruous images and meanings. If the sleep of Goya’s reason produced monsters, the inoffensive stuffed animals that Ringborg photographed at the Museum of Natural History, are turned into the elementary vocabulary of a potentially monstrous language. A language from which narrative is removed and humans, beasts, and objects are kept frozen on the threshold between familiar anxieties and uncanny premonitions. RB

ELENA ASCARI
Cells

The series of paintings presented by Italian artist Elena Ascari starts a new phase in her visual research. Ascari’s previous canvases portrayed the reflecting world of the malls’ escalators through a photorealist technique. The shiny world of glasses and mirrors was turned into a no-less-kitschy surface of gummy paint. The effect was one of complex visual fragmentation: repetitions, reflections, and distortions of the same figures resulted in an optical multiplication that could be read as an open sequence, a deconstructed story. With Cells, Ascari does a step further. Focused on the refracting skin of design objects, these new reflections destroy any perceptive continuity. An ordinary experience given by the popularization and domestication of Deconstructivist architecture is translated into a trope: close-up views become miniaturized oneiric visions. In the resulting kaleidoscope, humans as well as any other recognizable thing are fugacious and isolated apparitions. The story no longer exists, connections are lost. The aesthetic of very small reflective surfaces become, with Cells, a metaphor for the connective isolation of the i-phone era. RB

SCAFFOLDINGS

Please join us at HarlemStudioFellowship by Montrasioarte for the upcoming exhibition,

S c a f f o l d i n g s

featuring works by:
Mariagrazia Pontorno & Tamas Jovanovics
Curated by Raffaele Bedarida

Opening reception: Thursday, April 23, 2009 – 6.00 PM – 10.30 PMBy appointment: April 24 – May 4

Italian artist Mariagrazia Pontorno exhibits two works linked to each other and both entitled Roots. Her series of digital images adopt the iconography of traditional herbaria. Eight species of plants and flowers that grow and blossom in Central Park during the months of Pontorno’s residency in Manhattan, are painstakingly reconstructed in exceptionally precise 3D pictures (with the technical support of Alessandro Lupo and Francesco Palenga). Only at a closer analysis the viewer feels uncomfortable: the tension between naturalness and artificiality emerges slowly and uncannily from those plants. Printed and traditionally framed, the synthetic herbarium further resounds in the early-1900s environment of HSF’s townhouse. Pontorno’s second work is a storyboard, the project for a visionary video animation: the plants of the herbarium are now in Central Park’s Great Lawn. Touched by the wind, they emerge form the ground and levitate. In the background, the skyscrapers takeoff as space shuttles, showing their eradicated roots.

London-based, Hungarian artist Tamas Jovanovics exhibits Horizontal Straight Lines: a series of paintings exclusively consisting of horizontal straight lines (thousands of them) on square-shaped canvases. Combined in triptychs, the canvases are hung at 45 degrees, and the colored-pencil lines dash through the lozenges. The optical result on the canvas’ surface is that of a pulsing vibration, a centrifugal tendency (Rosalind Krauss), described by Jovanovics in terms of evasiveness. Beyond the canvases’ limits, the effect is that of an infinite continuity: the lozenges are “just” the visible terminals of the lines’ virtual limitlessness. An homage to Piet Mondrian’s New York work, Horizontal Straight Lines engage a dialogue with Manhattan: their infinite horizontality is playfully dialectical with the most vertical of all the cities.

HSF – residency program
for international artists
W128 121 St.
New York, NY 10027

www.harlemstudiony.org

www.hsfny.wordpress.com

Andrea Belfi – Stefano Pilia at HSF

• Two special guests, musicians Andrea Belfi and Stefano Pilia
  have been invited at HSF for the period March-April 2009. Their HSF project consists of a sound performance based on two different works: “Con i piedi per terra” by Belfi and “NY Strings” by Pilia. During their US stay, Belfi and Pilia are giving a series of concerts:

In New York City

-March 18th: Stefano Pilia/Andrea Belfi/Marina Rosenfeld (&Mudboy)
at Paris London
285 Kent Ave btwn s1 & s2
Williamsburg, NY
http://www.shinkoyo.com/parislondon/page1.htm
-March 23rd: Andrea Belfi/Stefano Pilia
at Goodbyebluemonday
1087 Brodway Brooklyn, NY
http://www.goodbye-blue-monday.com/
http://www.myspace.com/goodbyebluemondayinc
-March 24th: Andrea Belfi/Stefano Pilia/Margarida Garcia/Barry Weisblat
at the Lit Lounge
93 2nd Ave
New York, NY 10003
http://www.litloungenyc.com
-April 4th: Andrea Belfi/Stefano Pilia/David Grubbs (& Scott Haggart)
at Issue Project Room
At the Old American Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
http://issueprojectroom.org/2009/03/07/andrea-belfi-david-grubbs-stefano-pilia-trio-scott-haggart/

Out of NYC with Jeffrey Alexander (of Black Forrset/Black Sea:
-March 27th @ H+H, Baltimore MD
-March 28th @ Front Room Gallery, Cleveland OH
-March 29th @ Schlow Centre Region Library, State College PA
-March 31st @ The Nerve, Pittsburgh PA w/ Animental
-April 1st@ Skylab, Columbus OH w/ Caethua, Animental

Vice Versa – January 6, 2009

Please join us at HSF by MontrasioArte for the opening reception of Vice Versa, featuring works by artists-in-residence, Nicola Magrin and Issa Nyaphaga curated by Raffaele Bedarida.

Opening reception:
Tuesday, January 6th 2009 (6.30-10.30 pm)
128 W 121st Street (between Lenox and Powell).
Subway 2/3 to 116th Street or 125th Street

Vice Versa presents two specular approaches to art making. Nicola Magrin and Issa Nyaphaga are poles apart both formally and conceptually, yet they open up complementary possibilities of post-relational art practices.

Paris-based artist Issa Nyaphaga left his country, Cameroon, in 1996 as a refugee after being imprisoned and tortured for the publication of his political drawings, which targeted government officials. Active in counter-information and educational activities with schools, universities, cultural centers and social institutes mostly in France and in the US, Issa’s art practice ranges from painting to political drawing, from body art to performance and installation. At HSF, Issa presents a series of portraits of Barack Obama. Living in Harlem during the last months of the campaign and the presidential elections of November 2008, Issa witnessed these historical events from the outsider perspective of an African exile and with the eye of the political drawer. He has represented the iconic face of the President Elect on the backdrop of his words, white on black, showing the current in-between condition of intense expectations. A participatory performance, part of Issa’s ongoing project Urban Way, will take place during the opening reception, where the artist will dialogue with live music and the public through live painting, action, and body painting.

Italian artist Nicola Magrin exhibits large and medium size calligraphic works on paper where his daily experiences, encounters, and observations during his three-month stay in New York are translated into poetic, rarefied images. Magrin’s wonder before the range of banal and exceptional scenes or events encountered as a foreigner is initially an intimate fact, but it is then progressively turned, in his folios, into more universal images, which are, themselves, instruments of wonder. “Suddenly – he writes — the fear of a sheet of a piece of paper, good paper, clean, white ready to host some images, fruit of my excursions. And then to prepare the color – in this case instinctively mixing an ‘earth color’ with a black, dense and fragile as coal – finally, a lot of water… water from Harlem.” The artist’s presence is substantial: figures made out of single, uninterrupted brushstrokes that skillfully give shape to abundantly diluted ink, are the physical link between the visitor and the artist’s intimacy. Sometimes, if an affinity is established, Magrin works in presence of and for intimate audiences bringing the gesture back to its performative, yet non-heroic dimension.