GREGORY FORSTNER, Works on paper
OTTO ZOO Project:
KANDIS WILLIAMS, Red Square
OPENING: WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER, h 6 pm
Milan, November 2012
OTTO ZOO is pleased to present an exhibition dedicated to works on
paper by French artist Gregory Forstner (his second show at the
gallery), and a project room, Red Square, by young American artist
Kandis Williams, who is exhibiting her work in Italy for the first time.
Gregory Forstner is a passionate and instinctive painter. His
canvases inspired by the vast production of grotesque culture and by
European expressionism aesthetics, represent the everyday man’s myths,
rêveries and digressions. His drawings on paper remain close to the
principal themes of his work and to the humorous and caricature
structure of his archetypal and mythological characters: human kind
depicted in a reverse mode where animals take advantage of a situation,
the Hôtesses de l’air, the divers, the fishermen, Icarus, Daedalus,
Bacchus.
At OTTO ZOO, two series of charcoal drawings are
presented: the first one, Hôtesses de l’air, gathers portraits of women
wearing masks; their often desolate gaze contrasts with the sumptuous
style of their clothes and make-up; the second one, dedicated to Bacchus
and the Bacchantes is structured in single representations and in group
scenes illustrating farcical bacchanals, where the association with La
grande bouffe by Marco Ferreri or with the fool characters by Bruegel is
made explicit.
OTTO ZOO Project
The spacious collages
by Kandis Williams are constructed following an apparently chaotic
structure that in fact conveys a pictorial attitude. The artist works
using endless archives of pulp images from the web and the press,
collected to investigate the social and politic implications of
violence, race, and the erotic. The images are then reorganized
according to plastic and aesthetic criteria; where for example
photographic
documents are woven into elaborate braid patterns as seen in hairstyles of African immigrants in France in the 1960’s.
In the project room at OTTO ZOO, Williams will display a yearlong series of works developed from found
videos of street fights online. Following Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye
vision – which believes that real and extemporary images have more
vigour than those created in fiction – Williams has set up her own
universe of digital stills and snap-shots, spatially organized according
to a Suprematist logic, where the wide pixels of the paper copy are the
essence and code of her language and where forms and movements of
single
characters gain value that goes beyond the content and source of the video.
In collaboration with James Brittingham, Williams will also present
several large collages on mylar and plastic. These image/art objects
were built through a collecting and assembling narrative instances from
the lives of pop divas into maiden mother crone digressions.
Gregory Forstner (Douala, Cameroon, 1975) studied at the art academies
in Vienna, Nice and Paris. In 2008, he received a grant from Cultures
France (French Ministry of Cultural Affairs) as part of residency
program in New York. Since then, he has lived and worked in New York. In
recent years, he has had solo shows at the Musée d´Art Moderne et d´Art
Contemporain in Nice, at the Musée de Grenoble (The Ship
of Fools), at Galerie Zink in Munich and Berlin, and Galerie Eva Hober in Paris.
Kandis Williams (Baltimore, USA, 1985) studied at Cooper Union in New
York. She has exhibited her work at New Capital Projects in Chicago,
Gallery I-20 in New York and Peres Project in Berlin. She has also
collaborated in various mediums with Broken Dimanche Press (Publishing),
James Brittingham and dancer Ligia Manuela Lewis. This year she
received a grant from the EU commission to produce choreographies, and
has since founded the organization tanzCOLLECTED.
Segnala:
Amalia Di Lanno
