Richard Johansson / Erika Nordqvist | in Little Circus – Andrea Heimer

Mostra doppia personale di Richard Johansson e Erika Nordqvist. Mentre per il progetto in Little Circus l’artista invitato è Andrea Heimer.

Comunicato stampa

Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is proud to present Woods Where I Grew Up, the double personal exhibition of the Swedish artists Richard Johansson and Erika Nordqvist, curated by Michela D'Acquisto.
Richard Johansson, for the first time in Italy, ideally retraces the journey to North America that, during the nineteenth century, thousands of Swedes – coming from, as the artist, the rural region of Småland – have taken to escape the economic depression of those years. In the effort to preserve the memory and the sacrifices of the ancestors, Johansson draws from the events and the folk tradition of his country, using them as keys of interpretation of the contemporary society: the belonging to the Swedish working class and the promise of the American dream, but also the social inequality and the political struggle, are the themes that he tackles in his work, characterized by a naïve aesthetic and a playful impertinence. It is to the immediacy of his works that Richard Johansson entrusts the task of narrating the strongly contrasting and fragmentary history of Sweden – which so often gets intertwined with his own – using the «language but no words»[1] of the wild nature advocated by the compatriot Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel prize for literature in 2011.
On the occasion of her second show in the spaces of Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Erika Nordqvist continues to appropriate the reality of her surroundings through drawing. The creative process that distinguishes her works is always visible, at every phase, on the white paper: the initial state of uncertainty, marked by evident erasures, soon leaves space to increasingly confident signs, as if the artist was able to acquire consciousness of the world only by drawing it. And the rarefied world that Nordqvist conjures is nothing but a stage in the thick of the woods – one of those woods where our artists grew up. «In the middle of the forest there's an unexpected clearing that can only be found by those who have gotten lost»[2], and Erika Nordqvist's characters, perpetually hovering between existing and fading away, certainly seem to know this place.
On show paintings, large-format works on paper, and bronze and wooden sculptures.

[1] TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER, Poesia Dal Silenzio, Milano, Crocetti, 2001.
[2] TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER, Truth Barriers, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1980.

under the patronage of:

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ANDREA HEIMER
Sisterhood

Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is proud to present in Little Circus, the gallery space dedicated to special projects, Sisterhood, the first solo exhibition in Italy of the American artist Andrea Heimer.
Sisterhood is the term used by Andrea Heimer to define the bond – sometimes complicated and fragile, but always unique – between women.
Basing herself on experiences that only the female genre can fully understand, the artist explores with ease the world of girls during adolescence, that fleeting moment of transition between the innocence of childhood and the disenchantment of maturity, during which every experience is new and everything seems possible. Heimer openly denounces the difficulties of becoming adults in what still is “a man's world” with double standards, and no topic is too controversial: the intent is not to impress, but, clearly, to remove the stigma that hypocritically is still associated with the exploration of sexuality, the desire for independence, and the fight for equality of the “weaker sex”.
Andrea Heimer's painting is well suited to a narration of the formative education as autobiographical as reworked. Even at the level of perception the induced feeling is dual: if at a first glance her works, with their soft colors executed with a delicate hand, can deceive the eyes, the titles, elaborately descriptive, leave no room for misunderstanding. Undeniable, both conceptually and visually, is the influence of Henry Darger – the American brut artist who, self-taught, illustrated in watercolor an epic poem of his own invention in which scenes of eroticism and violence are reproduced in shading tones – as well as the decoration typical of Ancient Greece's black and red figure pottery.
The entire work of Heimer evokes the era of the myth, of the initiation rite that marks the one-way passage from one status to another and indelibly marks the individual.
On show ceramics, paintings, and works on paper.