Office Project Room, in collaboration with Nowhere Gallery, is proud to present a new exhibition by Irene Coppola (b. Palermo, 1991) in its own Milan project space.
The new work will inaugurate the cycle for a series titled Garden: an annual project at Office Project Room which invites the installation of new sculptural work in the green area of the project space. The thematic and specific proposition for the work in the series is to foster a dialogue between the practice of a young artist and the space itself.
Coppola’s Hanging Garden results from the artist’s frequent research visits to the Botanical Gardens in Palermo, particularly her studies of scenic arrangements of “hanging gardens” (from which the works takes its title), as well as the specific forms of presentation practiced by Carlo Scarpa and Franco Albini.
Thinking through formal critical issues which call into question the, at times, ambiguous discursive distance between the “natural” and the “artificial,” the work is the result of a practice that sees the transformation of natural elements and the collection of observations/explorations, as a practice in its own right.
The exhibited sculptures reproduce the leftover peels of three different types of plant (bamboo, palms and bananas). Coriaceous sheaths, the residual skins from specific vegetative cycles, naturally fall from the plant to free themselves from their original function, and in turn become objectified as something else. From here, the impulse is to preserve these carnal and typically ignored forms, though easily referenceable in vital and gestural expressions.
No more fragile than the original found elements, the material of the work is taken to its limits, where inserted tension creates empty spaces: the void. This state comes to the fore in the durability of the bronze, a living material, that stretches the time and resistance of the discarded plant waste, though still suffering from the same effects from the climate and the urban context in which it is inserted. A counter-monumental operation is suggested by the horizontal structure of the installation, which lowers the spectator’s point of view.
The display constructs the space from which the plant fragments emerge, which rather than defining dichotomies of inside/outside, front/rear, instead images fullness and the suspensions designed to intercept the objects against monochromatic backgrounds.
The continuation of a project already in the process of becoming (Herbarium), Hanging Garden is a work which expands its own discourse via an articulated architectural structure—the function of which suggests an action which finds the potential for defining a new territory for observations and phenomenological interpretations in the relations between sculpture, spectatorship, and the immediate environment.
Irene Coppola (Palermo, 1991, lives and works between Palermo and Milan). She studied at NABA_New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She took part in artistic residency projects in Italy and abroad, including: And And And for Documenta13 (Kassel, D), FHU_Free Home University (Lecce, IT), PACA_Proyectos Artisticos Casa Antonino (Gijon, E), DolomitiContemporanee (Pieve di Cadore, IT). Since 2014 she collaborates with Isola Art Center in Milan. She partecipated in the second edition of Do Disturb Festival at the Palais De Tokyo in Paris curated by Vittoria Matarrese and in 2017 she had two solo shows: Corrispondenze at the Caffè Internazionale in Palermo and The Flowers of Romance at the Nowhere Gallery in Milan. In 2018 she realized the public art project Costa Sud invited by the Ecomuseo Urbano Mare Memoria Viva of Palermo during the cultural ferment of Capital of Culture 2018 and Manifesta12. Today she started a new collaboration with the Botanical Garden of Palermo for future projects.
Among the collective exhibition: Brain-tooling, Forte di Monte Ricco, curated by DolomitiContemporanee, Pieve di Cadore, 2018; Perché non sono riuscito mai a nuotare ho deciso di volare, Federico Bianchi Contemporary Art, curated by Angelo Castucci, Milan, 2017; Trabajar para comer. RECORDACIÓN, Museo del Ferrocarril de Asturias, curated by Virginia Lopez, Gijon, 2016; Cachet de la poste faisant foi, Villa Mallet-Stevens, curated by Valentine Busquet, Paris, 2016; Cercare per mare e per terra, Casabianca, curated by Anteo Radovan, Bologna, 2015.
The Artist will work during the exhibition at the virtual archive: hanginggardenedition.tumblr.com
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