EXHIBITION n. 107
EXHIBITION TITLE: PRE-FAZIONE
ARTISTS: MINJUNG KIM - MARIA ELISABETTA NOVELLO - GAIA SCARAMELLA
CURATED BY: MARTINA CAVALLARIN – ELENA FORIN
INAUGURATION: SATURDAY 16 MAY AT 18.30
PERIOD: 16 MAY – 22 SETTEMBRE 2009
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Prefazione/Preface: feminine noun; introduction, preamble to a work explaining its genesis, aims, and methodological criteria.
It is from this sense of a “symbolic introduction” that the title Pre-fazione, Preface, derives. This is a three-person show representing young international artists: Minjung Kim, Maria Elisabetta Novello and Gaia Scaramella. This year, together with other artists, they will be taking part in a collateral show to be held during the period of the Venice Biennale: Sant’Elena – La seduzione nel segno. Between these artists there are, of course, geo-linguistic clashes, different codes and reasoning, dissonant yet necessary facts; however, the heart of Pre-fazione is the way in which these various stylistic expressions underline how each individual, private dialogue is but a part of the choral aspect of the exhibition. The works on show represent the embryonic stage of the pieces realised for the Venice Biennale, but they nonetheless maintain their own independence and individual aspects. A universe of possibilities is disclosed in the rooms of the! La Giarina gallery: a preface to what is revealed by Minjung Kim’s spiritual, burnt circles, her sensitive yet material waves of paper and glass; by Novello’s intangible line of ashes superimposed by a personal story of private and collective memories, with invisible narratives; by Scaramella’s deconstructed, sharp compositions held in balance by her talented use of engravings. Pre-fazione is a sedimentation of marks, a common way of thinking based on representative symbols, an energetic presence of works both relating to, and expanding around, each other in order to find harmony on the level of languages, experience, and poetics.
MARIA ELISABETTA NOVELLO was born in Vicenza on 16 October 1974; she lives and work in Udine. She has taken part in various group- and solo shows in public and private exhibition spaces. Recently, in 2007, she won the “ManinFesto” competition promoted by the Villa Manin centre for contemporary art; Sarah Cosulich Canarutto was the curator and the art director was Francesco Bonami. For some time her interest has been focussed on the use of ashes, an ephemeral and volatile material which allows her to investigate all its poetic, mark-making, material, pictorial, and installation potential in relation to such themes as presence, time, as well as a delicate feeling that is, all the same, resolute in affirming its own intense identity.
MINJUNG KIM was born in Gwangju in the Korean Republic in 1962. She is concerned with the theme of the appearance and the stratification of images which she undertakes through installations, paintings, and drawings. Her researches into the impalpability of marks and their shift into the mental and spatial dimensions of a certain “liquidness” have led to her being invited to exhibit in various group- and solo shows in Europe and Asia. In these she demonstrated how her interests are an important act of cultural mediation between languages, philosophies and concepts which differ in approach, mentality, and social references.
GAIA SCARAMELLA was born on 18 February 1979 in Rome where she lives and works. She has been awarded many prizes for contemporary art and engraving; the latter is a technique she employs for inquiring into individuals as social beings and the bearers of a culture that both mixes together contemporary memory, history, evocations, and scleroses, and has an obsessive hunger for, and regurgitation of, communications. Her works, which range from chalcographic prints to installations, examine mankind in order to create an aesthetic and emotive short-circuit between, on the one hand, sacredness, mysticism, and expressive proliferation, and, on the other, an iconographic, pictorial and poetic awareness of the past in relation to the present.