Arthub Favorite: Week 29
Arthub would like to introduce Michele Ciacciofera’s solo exhibition Enchanted Nature, Revisited, opening at CAFA Art Museum next Tuesday, July 26. Using varied media, including painting, sculpture, installation, pottery and video, through an anthropological and sociological lens the artist manipulates fragments of stories and memory in an effort to break down barriers of linear temporality. Michele explains that, “our identity is the history of the generations that preceded us, written and told in and by the system of tangible and imaginary symbols that represent it.”
For the purpose of the exhibition Hans Ulrich Obrist spoke with the artist, who explained that the fossils used in his artworks, “act as an archive because they encompass memory, while on the other hand these fossils inspired [him] to start reconstructing forms that are also the result of the psychological processing of reality.” Enchanted Nature, Revisited is a must see for 2016.
Duration: July 26 – September 11, 2016
Venue: CAFA Art Museum
Fourth floor Gallery, 8 Huajiadi South Street, Beijing
CAFA Museum is pleased to present the exhibition Enchanted Nature, Revisited of Italian/French artist Michele Ciacciofera, on view in the fourth floor Gallery from July 26 through 11 September, 2016. This is the first solo show by the artist in China.
Throughout his work, Michele Ciacciofera (b. 1969) consistently embraces a range of mediums, from installation and sculpture to painting and drawing that will accompany a recent video/sound installation conceived specifically for this exhibition.
The exhibition will also include a series of eleven installations culled from his visual exploration of Austrian physician and Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli and Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung’s 1952 The Interpretation of Nature and Psyche and also Pauli’s reflections on Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum.
The title Enchanted Nature, Revisited comes from the artist’s own sketchbook in which he regularly records his thoughts, which include his relationship to the world, and his re-imagining of nature and the environment. Ciacciofera conveys a sense of uncertainty and fragility, but also his deep affection for the natural world. In doing so, he underlines the crucial role of memory in his life and research.
The project features a vast installation comprising of large-scale paintings, drawings, hand-sculpted objects, ceramics and terracottas, assembled sculptures made from a mix of earth, concrete, and random found components. Some of these materials were sourced from the various places where he has lived and worked, and some come from his long term collection of objects that could now be described as readymades.
Ciacciofera’s concept for the exhibition is to represent an infinite, multifaceted understanding of how we sense Reality and Nature, and that there is no single path considered definitive or absolutely conditional.
With this Ciacciofera wishes to reconnect to the premise made by the early 20th century Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci on the subject of indifference, by attempting to simulate, through the chosen works, an iterative dialogue with visitors, and to share with them the emotional voyage through the artworks, and consider what works as a catalyst-modifier of our art-infused social space. Therefore, we are not talking about just a simple exhibit, but a shared “second look” and structural re-think.
The political and anthropological connotations derive from the vision expressed in the form of his chosen materials, including cardboard, polystyrene, terracotta, raw clay, and recycled other materials mostly derived from the natural world. These forms further suggest an aesthetic path from the figurative to the abstract and vice versa, without clear lines of demarcation.
Exhibition curated by Wang Chunchen
Find out more about Enchanted Nature, Revisited in the exhibition catalogue here.
About the artist
Michele Ciacciofera was born in Nuoro (Sardinia), Italy, was educated in Palermo in Sicily, (also in Italy) and currently lives and works in Paris, France.
Ciacciofera for many years studied landscapes and how humans change them, and human portraits to find their typus. His works have existential themes, with central or appended political and social questions employing a complex, intensely symbolic, visual language.
See Michele’s website for more details.