Damien Meade
CAR drde
via Azzo Gardino 14/a IT-40122 Bologna
+39 051 9925171 e-mail:
29th September > 10th November, 2018
CAR DRDE Gallery is pleased to present the first Italian solo exhibition of Damien Meade (1969, Ireland, lives
and works in London).
The exhibition includes a group of paintings specifically realized for the gallery but indicative of a practice that has distinguished his work for more than a decade.
At the base of each painting there is a clay object previously molded in the studio, sometimes with the addition of other materials that can serve to summarily define the shape.
They are busts, heads, figures not referable to a specific subject, or simple abstracts, two-dimensional, tactile and contrasted surfaces compositions.
These clay sculptures that are the model for the painting are never cooked so that every object can become something else: another shape for a new painting. Talking about Meade’s works, also means dwelling on something that no longer exists, or that has ceased to exist before the beginning of the painting: it is only thanks to a series of photo shoots that the object was able to become a referent, that is the subject of the painting.
Therefore every object painted by Meade is a sculpture – an ephemeral life sculpture, interstitial (between one painting and another), but it is also a shape whose material life is extended, through photography, in the painting. Every painting is a still life (for the simple reason that each subject is an inanimate object) but at the same time it is also a portrait, as when we are in front of the rough outlines of a bust, or of a head (and in this case they are portraits without a look, which escape a reciprocal exchange relationship with the observer).
Meade's paintings seem to sum up aspects that are not completely linked to one another and which are genres occasionally contradictory: the coexistence of the different expressions: painting, sculpture and photography; a painting that continues to commemorate the ephemeral materiality of sculpture; classical genres; the figure and the abstraction; and to exist in balance between two materialities – the one of the painting as an object and the one of the thing represented – which attract and refer to each other.
The exhibition includes a group of paintings specifically realized for the gallery but indicative of a practice that has distinguished his work for more than a decade.
At the base of each painting there is a clay object previously molded in the studio, sometimes with the addition of other materials that can serve to summarily define the shape.
They are busts, heads, figures not referable to a specific subject, or simple abstracts, two-dimensional, tactile and contrasted surfaces compositions.
These clay sculptures that are the model for the painting are never cooked so that every object can become something else: another shape for a new painting. Talking about Meade’s works, also means dwelling on something that no longer exists, or that has ceased to exist before the beginning of the painting: it is only thanks to a series of photo shoots that the object was able to become a referent, that is the subject of the painting.
Therefore every object painted by Meade is a sculpture – an ephemeral life sculpture, interstitial (between one painting and another), but it is also a shape whose material life is extended, through photography, in the painting. Every painting is a still life (for the simple reason that each subject is an inanimate object) but at the same time it is also a portrait, as when we are in front of the rough outlines of a bust, or of a head (and in this case they are portraits without a look, which escape a reciprocal exchange relationship with the observer).
Meade's paintings seem to sum up aspects that are not completely linked to one another and which are genres occasionally contradictory: the coexistence of the different expressions: painting, sculpture and photography; a painting that continues to commemorate the ephemeral materiality of sculpture; classical genres; the figure and the abstraction; and to exist in balance between two materialities – the one of the painting as an object and the one of the thing represented – which attract and refer to each other.
opening :
29th September 2018 h 18
mpefm
ITALY art press release
Gallery hours:
Thursday - Saturday 15:00 - 19:30
Thursday - Saturday 15:00 - 19:30
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