Tom Friedman / Sara Enrico / Asli Çavuşoğlu

Mostra personale di Tom Friedman “Open, Unto” e Focus on: Sara Enrico / Asli Çavuşoğlu.

Comunicato stampa

TOM FRIEDMAN

Open, Unto

Opening December 14, 7 - 9pm

December 15 – February 25, 2023

Vistamare is pleased to present Open, Unto, Tom Friedman’s second solo exhibition at the gallery in Milan.

The artist presents a series of new works created specifically for this exhibition, focusing on the world of our everyday existence, a world of objects and of images. Twenty years on from his exhibition at the Fondazione Prada, Tom Friedman is addressing experience and perception: the works on show are composed of unconventional materials that challenge our visual expectations. Objects creating an interplay between solids and voids become a means of probing and exploring the question of space. Material is transformed into sculpture and sculpture into material, in a continual stream of cross-references between ordinary, everyday iconographies, which never slide fully into abstraction but utilize the forms that are present to explore possibilities of scale and light. On a graph representing space-time, Friedman’s works represent velocity—the continuous flow of life, in the course of which we change, and hopefully evolve.

Tom Friedman was born in Saint Louis (1965), Missouri. He lives and works in Massachusetts. The starting point for his research is a uniquely idiosyncratic approach combined with the use of everyday materials and objects, such as styrofoam, pencils, paper, spaghetti and plastic cups, exploring the relationship between the making of art and the psychology of our perception of art. Like a scientist studying empirical and non-empirical phenomena and an object’s infinite references, Friedman analyses its imperceptible transformations. His work has been exhibited all over the world: the Museum of Modern Art, Moma, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; South London Gallery; Mead Art Museum and numerous other institutions.

Focus on:

Sara Enrico

Gallery 2

Asli Çavuşoğlu

Gallery 3

Opening Wednesday, December 14

h 7-9 pm

VISTAMARE MILANO

FOCUS ON

Sara Enrico

Asli Çavuşoğlu

Opening December 14, 7 - 9pm

December 15 – February 25, 2023

Vistamare is pleased to present Focus on. A new series of projects that, in conjunction with the regular gallery program in Milan, invite artists to create new site specifics works specially conceived for the two lateral and symmetrical rooms of the space.

Sara Enrico (Biella, 1979) presents a series of new works centered on the corporeal experience in an enigmatic and elusive form – both an abstraction and a narration. The narration begins with elements that are recurring in the artist’s practice, like the raw materials whose physical characteristics and potential she explores, and the traces of the gestures that have shaped the works. Probed for their tangible and haptic possibilities, these elements draw the viewer into a non-linear and visually discombobulating relationship with the work of art. From an initial deconstruction of the language of painting, to sculpture and techniques borrowed from the worlds of tailoring, choreography and architecture, the transmedia approach typical of Enrico’s work is summarised in its surfaces. Via the processes of translation and transformation undergone by materials such as cement, pigment and fabric, the artist also relates to the postural and symbolic aspects connected with the body, in a broad and liminal interpretation of anthropomorphism. The exhibition features works that are evocative physical presences, which the artist employs to inscribe the spaces they occupy with a theory regarding unrecognisable forms and bodies, which linger unresolved and defy classification, and whose superficial, epidermal qualities generate a sense of remove – a feeling that this is something alien.

“The body is a sounding board, and it has an attunement resulting from its cut, covering, or cavities.” (Gernot Böhme)

The starting point of Asli Çavuşoğlu‘s (Istanbul, 1982) research is an analysis of examples of resilience and of processes of transformation in nature including non-humans. The artist uses biological facts as a metaphor to probe the various ways in which living creatures respond to inhospitable environments: in order to adapt and survive, all beings are capable of slowing down their biological functions when they face extreme conditions. Çavuşoğlu is interested in the natural phenomena we are increasingly having to deal with as a result of pollution and climate change. In her exploration of these narratives, the artist emphasises material and techniques, creating a visual description of the world and its increasingly violent transformations. The works in this exhibition establish connections with and between materials derived from the nature, using them to construct new natural forms. Each of these contains traces of what it once was and what it will become, in an ongoing inquiry into the meaning of change.