Archive

SPRING 2020

Liz Rideal

Temporal Stabilities

Denis’s Ball. 2020. Gilded copper sphere, ⌀ 30 cm.
Etruscan Shield (Blue). 2020. Silk print, 90x90 cm.
Etruscan Shield (Verdigris). 2019. Frottage watercolor drawing, ⌀ 96 cm.
Flower Bomb (Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome). 2020. Silk print. 178x134 cm.
Medallion (Pontine). 2019. Frottage watercolor drawing, ⌀ 96 cm.
Medallion (Seagrass). 2019. Frottage watercolor drawing, ⌀ 96 cm.
Seagrass Mist (Annisquam). 2020. Silk print. 90x90 cm.

Temporal Stabilities brings together new works by Liz Rideal in the first showing in Rome of works by this celebrated British artist in a decade. The show is the culmination of a year-long international collaboration between the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL), The British School at Rome, and John Cabot University.

Temporal Stabilities explores the constancy in temporal change: the interlacing of actions and associations, the resonance of haptic memories, and the layering of processes and histories. Ancient traces are not left unseen; rather, Liz Rideal’s works traces their presence like haunting memories. They reveal these metamorphic pasts through multi-layered references and an easy touch of complex artistry.

The seven works selected constitute an amalgam of artistic methodology that in their hybrid forms conjure up cultural and temporal spaces through their use of color and textures. All the works were created in response to the visually extravagant marble Cosmatesque floors found in medieval churches throughout Rome, and each work explores this in a variety of processes and techniques.

The silk prints Flower Bomb (Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome), Etruscan Shield (Blue) and Seagrass, Annisquam transform the intricate floor patterns into evanescent, floating forms that questions the stabilities of materials and time – calling to mind both the histories of the quarried marbles, the history of the silk road trade, and the use of spolia as a statement of luxurious continuity. In the movement of the silk prints with the real-time currents of air, performing colored silks move through the atmosphere, transforming these images from a momentary photographic state, to an apparent reanimation of the in-situ creative action by the artist.

The frottage watercolor drawings Medallion (Pontine), Medallion (Seagrass), and Etruscan Shield (Verdigris) similarly create and subvert the illusion of movement. The rubbings of the Cosmatesque floors may start as copies of patterns in wax and pastel on Japanese paper; however, by purposefully moving the paper during the process, a fleeting quality is created. Like the presence of sitters in early photographs that moved during the process of capture, these works unveil patterns that are present yet intangible.
Successive processes of soakings, printings, dragging, pressings and repainting wrests new textures from the paper in a layering of actions and gestures that echoes the transformative nature of the spolia floors.
The series is brought together a by glimmering gilded copper sphere, Denis’s Ball. A modest ballcock, originally part of an ancient water tank atop the National Portrait Gallery in London, this repurposed modern object is a prism for the show. Resting on top of a corbel where once stood a statue of the Madonna, Denis’s Ball alludes as much to a Christian royal orb as to Jeff Koon’s ‘gazing balls’ and its altering reflection offers an alternative process for viewing the stable non-linearity of time.

Liz Rideal is an artist and author, with over 50 international solo exhibitions and artworks held in public collections including Tate; V&A; BM; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark; Berkeley Art Museum & Yale Centre for British Art, USA. Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL; Leverhulme Fellowship (2016-17), British Academy grant (2011), and a British School at Rome Scholarship (2008-9). Author of Mirror/Mirror: Self-portraits by Women Artists, National Portrait Gallery/Watson-Guptill, NY, 2001; Insights: Self-portraits, NPG, 2005; and How to Read Painting, Bloomsbury/Rizzoli, 2014/15. Co-author of Madam and Eve: women portraying women, Laurence King, 2018, and of the introduction to Phaidon’s 500 Self-portraits, 2018.

FALL 2019

Alessandro Vizzini

Sighting and Finding

Ignoto scultore meridionale (0001), 2019. PU 160 kg, polyurethane paint, copper, 64x25x14 cm;
Amphi (0008), 2019. Iron, nickel, 58x7x1 cm;
Pelagos III (0002), 2019. PU 160 kg, polyurethane paint, copper, 30x20x14 cm;
Che sorge (0009), 2019. Iron, nickel, 22x11x0,8 cm;
Pelagos II (0003), 2019. PU 160 kg, polyurethane paint, copper, 30x20x14 cm;
Singularis (0010), 2019. Iron, nickel, 22x11x0,8 cm;
Un quarto di luna (0004), 2019. PU 160 kg, polyurethane paint, copper, 30x20x14 cm;
Nella sabbia (0011), 2019. Iron, nickel, 20x6x0,8 cm;
O (0000), 2019. Iron, nickel, 170x2,5x1 cm.

Inspired by Alessandro Vizzini’s profound interest for the landscape understood as both space and environment, Sighting and Finding unfolds the process of observing.

Alessandro Vizzini unravels our gaze along an imaginary horizon line, which uninterruptedly runs through the 4m2 Gallery. It flows within the architecture of the Guarini Campus, reawakening memories of its distant past. People, stories and events coexist within the rooms in which various images conflate; and yet, these can still be individually sighted and quietly observed.

In the Upper Reading Room, sinuous headrests emerge from the walls and delineate sea from sky. They are silent observers, repositories of unknown memories, but also insatiable figures eager to find and collect new visual experiences. In a conversation with the corbel in the room, the sculptures allude to their past as protomi. By looking at them, we are invited to contemplate their horizon and to find new perspectives within its apparent boundaries.

The first observer is Ignoto Scultore Meridionale (0001). It is an atemporal figure who observes the space around him, witnessing a scene that is invisible only to us. Two seemingly identical sculptures, Pelagos II and Pelagos III, accompany the first observer. On the opposite wall, the last headrest, Luna, returns the gaze of the other observers. Metal objects nest on top of each headrest, lying within a bed that is naturally meant to receive them. Together, they become unique organisms composed of contrasting materials, yet share a symbiotic existence.

As we exit the space and descend the stairs, we cross the courtyard, and finally find ourselves submerged in the Aurelian Wing. In this space the horizon, delineated by a metal bar, marks the sea level. Its presence reminds us that we have accessed another domain where our perception of the space has inevitably changed.

Vizzini’s horizon gently interrupts the ordinary and inspires a welcome distraction. The 4m2 Gallery now enables a secure space in which works and viewers observe each other introspectively.

Alessandro Vizzini is a Sardinian-born artist currently based in Rome. Vizzini works with composite techniques that translate into a sculptural language. He uses modern materials to explore ancestral themes and reinterpret them through a conceptual process. He has exhibited his works both nationally and internationally, including venues and galleries such as the American Academy in Rome, Villa Medici and Frutta Gallery.

SPRING 2019

Geoff Uglow

Era di Marzo // It was in March

Cubile Veris. Oil on linen, 200x170 cm. 2018.
Alpheia’s Dream. Oil on board, 60x70 cm. 2017.
Le Coussin de Josephine. Oil on board, 60x70 cm. 2018.
L'albero della Madonna Lapiz lazuli. Oil on board, 30x20 cm. 2016.

The title Era di Marzo // It was in March, is inspired by the Neapolitan love song, Era de Maggio, based on the 1885 poem by Salvatore di Giacomo, which describes a love born and sustained in the heady scent of roses and the recurrence of their blooms.

Era di Marzo // It was in March alludes to the vibrancy of a moment that is entirely of itself because of its mutability. It is not a past remembered but rather the unfolding gesture of an embodied flux, a powerful belief in tomorrow.

Geoff Uglow’s paintings transform the temporary, fleeting delicateness of rose blooms into vital, vibrant experiences that seamlessly merge past and present. Uglow creates each painting in a single day; the intensity of this process enables him to capture and translate specific moments in time: the gentle scent of blooming roses, the delicate morning breeze, the crystalline dew.

After years spent taking care of his rose garden, Geoff Uglow instinctively knows which fragments of beauty to immortalize on his canvases. He tenderly selects the leaves and petals through an experienced sensibility that allows him to carve out bold, intuitive marks to represent them.

Above all, Uglow’s works explore the act of looking. The gesture in the application of the paint, rendered in complex and visceral surfaces, are less concerned with the representation of roses as objects than with the processes of painting that may conjure up the effervescence and vigor of blooms. In this way the roses are at once metaphors for and doubles of the gestures and processes of painting.

The three works, Cubile Veris, Alpheia’s Dream, and Le Coussin de Josephine, each in different ways allude to growth, change, and regeneration as a creative process. They hence form a compelling, unified experience of being at the cusp of a captured moment – entirely befitting the equinoxes that frame the show.

The show is sponsored by The Vanessa Somers Art Project.

Born in 1978, Geoff Uglow is a British painter from North Cornwall. Considered one of the greatest talents to emerge from the Glasgow School of Art in recent years, he has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sainsbury Scholarship at the British School at Rome from 2002-2004. Featured in several galleries in the UK, including The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, and Connaught Brown in London, and at the Royal Academy 2018 Summer Exhibition in London, his works have also been exhibited internationally in Rome and Dusseldorf.

FALL 2018

Giulio Turcato and Spring

Urpflanze

Giulio Turcato, Metamorfosi. Litograph, 62 x 75 cm, 1972.
Spring, Urpflanze. Mixed media, size variable, 2018.

This exhibition was born as a simultaneous reading of Giulio Turcato’s print, Metamorfosi (1972), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s text “Metamorphosis of Plants” (1790).

In this treaty, Goethe examines a series of traits common to various plants’ characters, in an attempt to find unity in formal dynamism: ordo ab chao. He concludes with a hypothesis about the existence of a prehistorical, archetypal plant — the Urpflanze —from which all plants would derive.

Spring has materialized Goethe’s originary Urpflanze (2018), an imaginary fossil of the archetypal plant. The poet died in 1832 without proof to validate his theory. This artwork is a gift to Goethe and an homage to his visionary idea of genesis and genetics, a forerunner of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The fossil takes its cue from one of the greatest botanical illustrators, Pierre-Jean-François Turpin, who, like Spring, was deeply impressed by Goethe's precocious speculations.

In Turcato’s print, recurrent themes from Goethe’s “Theory of Colors” (1810) are also evident; indeed, Goethe theorized that all colors originate from a metamorphosis of blue, red, and yellow: the three archetypal colors. In Turcato’s piece, this metamorphosis is enacted through the painter’s characteristic marks, revealing an organic quality of tone.

Both works suggest an alternative understanding of metamorphosis: Turcato’s print reads as a consequence, or conclusion, of the transformational process; Spring’s fossil harkens back to a common, lost origin.
Turcato’s Metamorfosi and Spring’s Urpflanze merge modern art and botanical philosophy in a demonstration of the ever-changing force of artistic inquiry. Both artists offer a personal interpretation of the concept of metamorphosis by making visible its fundamental duality: how it evolves, how it ceases to be. Physical proximity is the a priori requirement for the works to communicate with each other and with their viewers. Their vicinity enables the works to converse, and invites the viewer to become an active participant in that conversation. When the three are brought together, the concept of the exhibition comes to life, generating an unexpected synthesis.

The works are presented in a space shared by a research community that will glean answers, or perhaps more-so, questions, from this artistic metamorphosis. Like Goethe’s archetypal plant, the library is the primordial place for intellects to evolve and flourish.

Giulio Turcato (b. 1912, Mantua; d. 1995, Rome) worked in a variety of media, both figuratively and abstractly. After attending the Venice Academy’s school of Life Drawing in the early 1930s, he joined the Communist party and moved to Rome to work underground for the Resistenza. His unique style and choice of media reveal his interest in the work of diverse European masters and, above all, his creativity and his attention to looking. From 1942 onwards, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale and, in 1959, at Documenta II. Turcato was active in several artistic groups, among which: Forma 1 in 1947, alongside Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo; Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, in 1948; and Continuità in 1961.

Spring is an artists’ collective founded in Rome in 2017. It bases its research on the study and interaction of the work of art with the plant kingdom. Spring’s past shows include, most notably: HO HO HO, a group exhibition held at Frutta Gallery (25 November 2017 - 24 February 2018).

SPRING 2018

Geraldine Hope Ghelli

and Catherine Parsonage

Untitled + Campari Spring

Geraldine Hope Ghelli, Untitled. Digital Photograph, 45 x 45 cm.
Geraldine Hope Ghelli, Untitled. Digital Photograph, 45 x 45 cm.
Geraldine Hope Ghelli, Untitled. Digital Photograph, 45 x 45 cm.
Catherine Parsonage, Campari Spring. Coloured pencil, pastel, watercolour on Fabriano paper in perspex frame, 111 x 66 cm, 2017.

Geraldine Hope Ghelli is an American-Italian freelance documentary photographer currently based in Rome, Italy. Since graduating from John Cabot University in 2015, her work has been featured in international publications including, The New Yorker, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Teen Vogue, and La Vanguardia.

Ghelli brings a humanist approach to her work documenting and attempting to understand the recent wave of independence movements and their geo-political, economic, and human rights repercussions. Featured in The New Yorker (July 16, 2017) Ghelli’s work was described as consciously subverting the form of the portrait by letting her camera become a roving, kaleidoscopic eye, taking in all the shades of life.

Catherine Parsonage was born in 1989 on the Wirral, England and now lives and works between Rome and London. She is an MA graduate from the Royal College of Art and was the Sainsbury Scholar in Painting & Sculpture at the British School at Rome 2016-7. Parsonage’s practice incorporates painting, sculpture, performance and poetry and has been exhibited internationally in London, Berlin, Turin, Milan and Rome.

Catherine Parsonage’s practice combines personal experience with a wide range of literary references including fiction, mythology & poetry; the resulting work explores emotional and identity-based states, caught on the boundary between the imagined and the real. Campari Spring was first exhibited by the curatorial collective Garbo’s in Full for it: Tomaso de Luca & Catherine Parsonage, Rome. The drawing imagines the body in a state of liquid flux and touches upon the hazy aesthetics of pleasure and reverie.

FALL 2017

William Pettit

The Omniverse Dilemma

Untitled Homemade iris pigment on pig intestine, mounted on paper, 30 x 40 cm, 2017
Enso Dragonsblood and saffron on pig intestine, mounted on paper, 30 x 40 cm, 2016
Untitled from Periodic Tables Cochineal and dragonsblood on Arches paper, 30 x 40 cm, 2016
Untitled Suminagashi, Chinese ink on rice paper, 30 x 40 cm, 2017
Untitled from Cosmic Bodies, Homemade iron gall ink on Arches paper, 20 x 26 cm, 2016
Untitled Homemade iron gall ink, olive oil and gold on paper, 20 x 26 cm, 2016

The pieces come from the union of two artistic intentions. One concerns research in local and homemade materials, traditional ingredients and pigments related to the history of both cooking and painting. They present a sample of locally sourced colors (saffron, cochineal, iris, oak gall, and pomegranate inks) and supports made by the artist, based on medieval and Renaissance artists’ manuals. The other is an exploration of physical and scientific structures and how they influence accumulation and flow, and the gesture and the hand of the artist. There is a balance between structure and chance that reflects both cosmic and cellular formations. The union of these two intentions form a biology of painting, where the infinitesimal qualities of animal and vegetable chemistry reflect the elements of a macro and micro cosmic genesis, order, and entropy. Here, material is the protagonist, rather than the artist.

William Pettit is an artist and poet who works as a professor of Studio Art at both John Cabot University and at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy. He has been exhibiting his works in Philadelphia, Paris, and Rome since 1996 and he has been publishing poetry since 1992; he also works as a sculptor, musician, photographer and video artist. Beyond this he is founder and director of The Bottega which offers workshops in different media, and of the Fiorentini Art Studio Gallery of the John Cabot University Studio Arts program.

SPRING 2016

Jochem Schoneveld

The Diver

The Diver Photograph, 60×75 cm, 2011-2016

The Diver is part of a series of pictures and oils on canvas called Memory and Etruscan Landscape. The pictures aim to reproduce the “Etruscan atmosphere” of the site where they were taken and to have the viewer imagine the place with all their senses, letting the viewer in both the space and time of the photographs. The concept of Memory links the photographs to the oils on canvas representing the name of the Etruscan sites in binary language, also connected to memory across time. In the digital age technology is our main archiving support, whereas in the past peoples wrote words to transmit knowledge. Binary language becomes similar to the Etruscan language: intrinsic to both are pieces of information, but neither of them is understandable to us, thus highlighting the fragility of memory.

Jochem Schoneveld, born in Holland in 1973, is a photographer and lecturer of photography based in Rome whose work is characterized by a focus on the human-altered landscape. His work has been published in international journals and exhibited at fotofestivals and galleries in Italy and Holland.

Rome Lost and Found is a work that retraces the footsteps of Dutch artists in the 16th and 17th century Rome. The artist looks back at his fellow countrymen and their drawings of Roman ruins, cityscapes, monuments and countryside, and makes his own version in his own media, photography.

FALL 2015

Serafino Amato

Vanguard

Vanguard Photograph, 100×125 cm, 1996

Situated in the center of a black and white industrial background, a man in workman’s overalls, cap on backwards, bends over into an old industrial container that, from bottom to top, reads Vanguard. His head is buried in the darkness and as such, he remains anonymous. His search remains ambiguous. Is he reaching for something at the bottom? Is the container full or empty? What is he looking for? His simple, unremarkable action poses many unanswered questions. In such a setting, Vanguard must of course signify an industrial brand, but has also connotations of innovation and experimentation. After all, each student the library repeats the enigmatic action of the man in Vanguard: we come to look for knowledge and resources, digging for answers to our enigmas or for something buried deep in our thoughts.

Serafino Amato has been involved with the field of photography since 1989. His work first evolved out of his experience in experimental theater and has since developed to include digital photography and video art. A professor since 2008, he teaches different methods and styles of photography, including Pinhole Photography, Video Art and Digital Photography.

FALL 2014

Peter Flaccus

Black Ellipse with Seven Events

Black Ellipse with Seven Events Encaustic on wood, 135×99.5 cm, 2007

Seven blotches of wax arranged in an ellipsis expand and alter their status within the space of the painting. The continuously changing and dynamic quality of this elliptical system makes the circular shapes come alive as “events”: events that were set in motion in the moment of artistic creation and continue to unfold before the viewer’s eye in retaining a relation with the physical circumstances of their making. These circles evoke in their organic quality cosmic shapes and natural incidents: as it happens in nature, the artist scarcely intervenes in changing the course of the “events”, and yields to the substance of the wax the power of determining the painting’s formal organization.

Peter Flaccus, born in Missoula, Montana, in 1947, received a MFA in Painting, at Indiana University. He is an artist and teacher. His work has been displayed in solo and group exhibitions throughout Italy, Europe and the US and has been featured in catalogues. Flaccus won numerous grants and fellowships throughout his careers and his artworks entered high standing European and American collections.

FALL 2013

Andrew Rutt

Lei è la mia montagna

Lei è la Mia Montagna Neon, 2012

Lei è la Mia Montagna is part of a three-month project that the artist carried out in the oldest marble sculpture studio in Carrara. The relationship between the artist, the local territory and its people is substantiated in this object. Lei è la Mia Montagna is the artist’s response to the life memories that a Carrarese decided to share with him: conceived as a topographical map as much as a portrait, the neon piece describes a man’s personal history and identity as they developed in relation to the territory of Carrara. Media and colors have been specifically chosen to reproduce the experiential dimension of his memories. The neon reminds of the signage of ballrooms, and its cobalt blue evokes calm and a counteraction of chaos that unfold in the synchronization in ballroom dancing, whereas the fragility of the glass exemplifies the perilous relationship of the Carraresi with their land.

Andrew Rutt, based in Rome since 2000, studied Fine Art and Critical Theory at Central St. Martins and Goldsmiths College in London. His work, that incorporates videos, sculptures, photographs and installations, has been exhibited in solo and group show at Galleries in both London and Rome. Recent shows have seen a shift in direction in his work which has placed greater emphasis on a collaborative, relational aesthetic; involving individuals and groups of non-art professionals in the creation of his projects.