Still Life Remix
from 3 July 2015 to 4 October 2015
San Casciano in Val di Pesa (FI)
To mark EXPO2015, Antinori Art Project presents *Still-life Remix*, an exhibition bringing together works by twenty-six contemporary artists – both international and Italian – who explore the expressive possibilities of the contemporary still life. Photographic, sculptural, pictorial and video works capture the passage of time through the visual representation of an impossible balance between the natural and the artificial.
The exhibition presents ‘ ’ – classic still lifes in which flowers and fruits, depicted alongside game, in compositions devoid of human presence and enriched with symbolic objects such as skulls, pearls, books or timekeeping instruments, serve as a reminder of the fragility of beauty and the inevitability of death. By juxtaposing works by emerging artists with those of leading figures in the field of contemporary art, the exhibition explores how, in a society dominated by digital images and the media bombardment of multinational food corporations, artists remain interested in the genre of the still life.
The works demonstrate how the values of composition and chromatic balance are reinvented and completely transformed with irreverent imagination to capture the passage of time in a single image. Thus, for example, the wall painting created specifically for this exhibition by Nicolas Party creates a surreal still-life image, in which giant fruits in artificial colours transport the audience into a fantastical and childlike world, whilst Wolfgang Tillmans’ images demonstrate how the still-life genre has been transformed by capturing everyday life and the traces of human presence in space. Ori Gersht ’s video and photographic works reveal the inseparable link between violence and beauty through the sudden explosion of still lifes that seem to have stepped out of the finest 17th-century Flemish painting. Hans Peter Feldmann creates a tableau vivant of small vases of artificial flowers, emphasising the pictorial nature of the objects that surround us, whilst two emerging talents, Santo Tolone and Elisa Strinna, ironically reappropriate classical iconography to transform it into something else. Matt Collishaw ’s still lifes depict ‘the Last Supper’, commissioned by a group of death row inmates in the United States, highlighting the profound connection between who we are and what we choose to eat and drink.
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