Venice: Querini
Stampalia Foundation: Qiu Zhijie - New Roads – The Unicorn and the Dragon
exhibition. Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie,
chief curator of the last edition of the Shanghai Biennale presents at the
Querini Stampalia Foundation, until August 18, a selection of new works, entitled
The Unicorn and the Dragon, curated by Chiara Bertola and Davide Quadrio. The
artist explores the complex dynamics that outline space and time routes between
the East and the West, the Past and the Present. The title of
the exhibition “The Unicorn and the Dragon, a map of the collections of
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice and Aurora Museum, Shangai is inspired by
Umberto Eco’s conference, “They were looking for unicorns“, held at Peking
University in 1993. In which Eco quoted that Marco Polo who, when
seeing a rhino during his travels in the East, immediately identified it as a
unicorn, in keeping with the classification for defining a creature with a horn
that Western tradition had so far made available to him.
Qiu Zhijie –
The Unicorn and the Dragon exhibition. Finishing touches. Qui Zhijie is considered a
real intellectual in the Renaissance meaning of the word, he is all in one - a
thinker, an artist, a cartographer and even an archivist of knowledge.
Qiu Zhijie – The Unicorn and the Dragon exhibition. The new series of maps by Qiu Zhijie, some of
them produced on paper using an ancient Chinese technique of dab rubbing and
others drawn with ink directly on site expose these very bizarre misunderstandings
that stem from the relations of cultural exchange between Italy and China and
in a broader sense between the East and the West. Using multiple historical,
philosophical and figurative references, the artist takes us through the
history and evolution of these mystifications and helps us discover how these
misleading interpretations could be fundamental in the discovery of new and
unexpected cross-cultural analogies.
Co-curator with Davide
Quadrio, Chiara Bertola.
Photograph courtesy
Querini Stampalia
Qiu Zhijie –
The Unicorn and the Dragon exhibition. Looking at
the maps of this Chinese artist, one can easily notice the similarity with the
organicity and fluidity of the sinuous and dense map of Venice. Qiu Zhijie draws up his maps detecting a
system of typologically classificated cells, which are consolidated, each one
with the others, in a similar way as the places that form the urban texture of
the Serenissima. These mutual links between these conceptual cells give life to
extraordinary cartographies that, like big turned tapestries narrate of the
many knots and wires that maintain them together.
Querini Stampalia Foundation: Matta exhibtion - Roberto Sebastian Matta -
Gordon Matta-Clark - Pablo Eschaurren. Three names, three histories and
just one common denominator: art.
For the first time together,
the exhibition gathers three main
protagonists of the international art scene in the Scarpa wing of
the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, until August 18. Gordon Matta-Clark and Pablo Echaurren don’t only
share the same father Roberto
Sebastian Matta, historical personality who took part in the Surrealism
movement and influenced American artists of the Abstract Expressionism with his
canvases and sculptures, but both of them are personages of the contemporary
artistic scene with their own different expressive styles.
Above: Roberto Sebastian Matta. The exhibition, curated by Danilo Eccher, starts
with the work of Roberto Sebastian Matta which covers half a century of history of art, lived in three different countries:
France, United States and Italy.
Gordon Matta-Clark.
Children of the same father, but of different
mothers, both Gordon and Pablo had a conflicting relationship with the father
figure and they both searched a conceptual dialogue, impossible in their
private life, with Matta through their art even if they have elaborated, each
one with his own style, unique and different languages. If the similarity with
Matta-Clark can have references even at a formal, aesthetic-architectural level
which is present in a different way even in his father's work, in Echaurren the
affinity is to be found above all in the conceptual aspect deriving from the
same Dadaist and late Surrealist source of his father and brother.
Pablo Echaurren.
The link between their art forms is clear and what
is present in their works are social relations, they are always looking for a
relationship with the public who doesn't only participate but is involved
directly or indirectly, physically and mentally, culturally and socially,
inside or outside the work.
Querini Stampalia Foundation: Nick
Devereux – Inpainting. For Inpainting, at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, until
June 30, artist Nick Devereux embarks on a completely new research, starting
from the text in which Pausanias, the Greek traveler and geographer of the II
century AD, known for Description of Greece, diligently describes in this ten
volume cultural geography of the Greek territory, the now-destroyed frescoes of
Polygnotus at Delphi.
Nick Devereux – Inpainting. In the works shown at Fondazione Querini
Stampalia, minimal geometrical constructions, interfere with the main figures,
subtracting their specific identities. Devereux’s gesture disrupts the scene
and the classical visual display, provoking an effect of disorientation to the
viewer’s allured eye. The recurring vertical form becomes an emblem, generating
a new epic, or better a hybrid: the synthesis of the origin and the process.
One of Devereux’s dealers Paola Clerico, from Art at Work. AAW has no
specific exhibition venue and each project is conceived, produced and realized
in an ever-changing situation.
Querini Stampalia Foundation:
Jacob Hashimoto – Gas Giant. Jacob Hasimoto’s exhibition, Gas Giant,
until September 1, organized by Studio la Città, and curated by Marco
Meneguzzo, is a large-scale site-specific installation that the artist has
conceived for interaction with the rooms of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in
Venice; its aim is to create an unmediated relationship with the viewer. The
work of Jacob Hashimoto is characterized by the use of certain stylistic
elements borrowed from Japanese culture, such as kites made from bamboo and
paper; Jacob reassembles these to build huge installations and interactive
sculptural forms that literally invade the exhibition area.
Jacob Hashimoto – Gas Giant. The artist has said, “There is a playful
component in my work. The stylistic elements that I use have something to do
with a general feeling of nostalgia rather than any direct relationship to my
origins. Kites are about a feeling for childhood and a relationship to nature
rather than a particular Japanese tradition”. Gas Giant consists of about
10,000 bamboo and paper kites handmade by the artist.
Querini
Stampalia Foundation: Chiara Fumai - I did Not Say or Mean ‘Warning’. Chiara
Fumai, presents her video-performance, I did Not Say or Mean ‘Warning’, until
June 30, at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. The piece is a reworking of
the project for which the artist was awarded the 2013 Furla Prize in January by
relating it to the spaces within the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, thus giving
rise to a site-specific project.
