26/09/2017
Maurizio Pellegrin @ NEOCHROME opening Friday (29 Sept)
NEOCHROME is pleased to announce The Stoker, the first solo show at the gallery by Maurizio Pellegrin, curated by Filippo Fossati.
The title of the show, The Stoker, is borrowed from the first tale written by Franz Kafka in his youth, republished as a fragment of the novel "Amerika". The works that Maurizio Pellegrin has made for the Turin exhibition share not only the title but also the existential circumstances in a disturbing and intangible system that constantly puts the author in bizarre situations. In his words: "These works for Turin are submerged by a subtle desire of passing through. The elements used for the works recall, through their previous functions, constant movement: the violin’s bow, the boxing gloves, the shaving brushes, and the almost infinite needle work in the manufacture of old carpets. This group of works enclose and carry American feelings, America that I have known, that America where constant work keeps things in motion almost to the detriment of the spirit. A feeling of abandonment, among the great patchwork refers to the dreams of the seventies while the clown costume to the new American disguise; few colors and many symbols of this epiphany of noisy silence that has accompanied me for many years.“ Maurizio Pellegrin has been busy for a long time in an ambitious project; he wants to depict the emotions, movements, energies and tensions of human activity present and past. Through objects, residues, artifacts of vitality and human workmanship, he wants to represent the game and simultaneously represent the rules of the game, following his own mysterious plot scheme. He sets out to make sense and order to an apparent chaos that is life without falling into the trap of a banal realism nor, a more or less, emblematic, allusive allegory. It is not just about creating images, but inventing compositions in front of which the viewer is actively engaged. It's about using the look, creating a style, setting the rules, determining the premise. In illustration and ideology, an ambitious project. The artist stages, an endless series of works, in which the elements in the field are passengers and transitory remains of our past. Reality, the artist seems to say, does not exist, all that surrounds us is just a fabrication of our own mind. The underlying theme remains the usual; the daily absurdity of the human condition, where decisive moment is perpetual and never definitive, because everything has happened and nothing has yet happened.
(In collaboration with the Esso Gallery in New York)
Maurizio Pellegrin was born in Venice, July 21st 1956, Italy. He lives in New York and Venice.
He holds a Master degree in Art History at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, at the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy. He studied Sociology at New School University, and Eastern Philosophy at New York University, New York. He also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, holding the equivalent of the American MFA in Studio Art.
Pellegrin has had hundreds of exhibitions in major museums and galleries throughout his career, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy and the Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, Italy.
Pellegrin was the Director of the Venice Program Master of Art at New York University and taught Phenomenology of the Arts and Advanced Studio at Teachers College, Columbia University. In addition, he taught Modern Design and Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently the Dean of the National Academy School at the National Academy Museum and School in New York, where he also teaches the Advanced Studio course, and he is the curator of the gallery.
Thanks to his international experience, Pellegrin was appointed in 2017 as Chief Executive of Cultural Affairs at two ancient Venetian Institutions, I.R.E. and Fondazione Venezia. There he has created the program Observatory for the Arts whose objective is to sustain cultural debate, to maintain the Institutions’ historical sites and overall to support life itself in Venice.
There is a vast literature on his work. He is the author and subject of more than 30 monographs, and his work has been published in more than 500 articles and essays.
