A place of one’s own
Michael Assiff, Anne Buckwalter, Greg Carideo, Michael Cline, Tomas Harker, Ryan Nord Kitchen, Yoora Lee, Mevlana Lipp, JJ Manford, Galina Munroe, Dominic Musa, Boluwatife Oyediran, Foster Sakyiamah, Koichi Sato, Lumin Wakoa, and Kiki Xuebing Wang
Davide Silvioli
Michael Assiff, Anne Buckwalter, Greg Carideo, Michael Cline, Tomas Harker, Ryan Nord Kitchen, Yoora Lee, Mevlana Lipp, JJ Manford, Galina Munroe, Dominic Musa, Boluwatife Oyediran, Foster Sakyiamah, Koichi Sato, Lumin Wakoa, and Kiki Xuebing Wang
Davide Silvioli
A Place of One’s Own brings together works by artists with different styles and attitudes, by electing painting as term of aesthetic comparison, with a common sensitivity in the interpretation of landscapes and domestic contexts, as the reflection of one's own interiority.
The same sense of place emerges, mutatis mutandis, in Virginia Woolf's famous essay A room of one's own, 1929. The purpose is clearly different but with the same need to affirm an active presence even in a brand-new context: Virginia Woolf was looking for the recognition of female literary contribution in the history of writing; these artists are matching their personalities with the places they are familiar with, albeit with different intentions.
An extension of individuality, therefore, that they express at times in a manifest way and at others in implicit terms, both through the subversion of canon figurations and through concentration on metaphorical subjects. Nonetheless, in this evident artistic plurality, the conception of the portrait as a conjunction point between the intimate dimension and the external world remains constant. It is on this basis that the exhibition offers an international selection of thirteen artists – exhibiting for the first time in Rome - who deepen the expressive ways of contemporary painting, sharing an intimist approach in reading the external world, both domestic and otherwise, with the filter of their own subjectivity translated into their works.
While carrying out this predisposition, artists indirectly place themselves in a relationship of equation with the surrounding, tracing, moreover, the concept of Place identity theorized by the psychologist Harold Proshansky in 1983, providing a further reading key to delve into the contents of the works. Just like Proshansky described the influence of the ego when interfacing with the world, these artists face the art of painting by means of those mediums needed to carry out this assignment.
This trend is shown in the exhibition through the detection of very different styles and results, until revealing a proximity with Bad painting and Realism, Expressionism and Liberty decorativism, however always with a huge contamination among each other.
Reading between the lines, therefore, thanks to the internationality of the authors involved and their great expressivity, the exhibition deepens a topic of actual social relevance, creating a concise but precise overview of contemporary painting reality.
