The artistic influences in Italy were overwhelming . From classical sculpture and painting to modern installations and photography, I saw more art in the three months there than I have in probably my entire life. Here are some of the highlights:
Niki De Sait Phalle
(Tarrot Gardens and Museum of the Rome Foundation)
Niki is French artist known for her "nana" sculptures with bright colors, curvy figures and whimsical style. I love her playful images and sculptures and her ability to transplant you directly into her vivid imagination. There was a show of her work in Rome containing a mix of drawing and sculpture, and a permanent installation called the "Tarot Gardens" in the countryside of Tuscany containing complex sculptures inspired by the Tarot cards.
Exit of the School, The Dressmaker, Machine to Dream
(The Tarrot Gardens)
Tuscany, Italy
"If life is a game of cards, we are born without knowing the rules. Yet we must play out hands throughout the ages. Poets, philosophers, alchemists, artists, have devoted themselves to finding their meaning."
- (Engraved in pathway through the gardens)
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
(Villa Borghese)
The most beautiful thing I saw in Rome.
Apollo e Dafne, Persephone
Fiona Tan
(Venice Biennale)
Video Still from "Rise and Fall"
One minute clip here
This was one of my favorite artists at the Venice Biennale. Her split screen film comments on memory, nostalgia, and aging.
Francis Bacon and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
(Villa Borghese)
Paired together, these two artists offered contrasting perspective on reality and portraiture. Bacon tends to blur his portraits in an attempt to capture the spirit of the individual through their implied motion. Caravaggio, however, has overwhelming "realistic" style, so much so that some of his commissions were denied for being unfaltering, also for his common use of street people and prostitutes to pose as the Virgin Mary.
"I think that our sense of realism has been changed to some extent since surrealism- well, really, since Freud- because we've been made more conscious of how realism can drawn on the unconscious... I believe that realism has to be re-invented. It has to be continuously re-invented... I believe that reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that it has to be re-created otherwise it will be just an illustration of something- which will very second hand." - Francis Bacon
Saskia Olde Wolbers
("Manipulating Reality", Srozzina, Florence)
Film Stills from "Placebo"
This is the best HD film I've seen. Ever. An architectural environment is created with the movement of this white liquid, while a voice narrates a complex story about a lover, and at the end your left wondering what was true and what was a fantasy. "Wolbers uses events that actually happened to develop stories that shimmer and sway between dream and reality."
