To celebrate the opening of EXPO 2015, the Antinori Art Project is proud to present Still-life Remix, an exhibition that brings together works of art from twenty-six international and Italian contemporary artists who explore modern Still-life painting’s expressive qualities. Artwork in various mediums including photographs, sculptures, paintings and video productions capture the passing of time through the visual representation of an impossible equilibrium between natural and artificial.
The exhibition features classical Still-life artwork in which flowers and fruit, portrayed together with hunted animals are devoid of any human figures and enriched with symbolic objects such as skulls, pearls, books or instruments for measuring time becoming a reminder of beauty’s fragility and the inevitability of death.
Through the juxtaposition of artwork by emerging and well-established contemporary artists, the exhibition questions how in today’s society, filled with digital images and a continuous barrage of ad campaigns by multinational food companies, can artists still be interested in the Still-life genre.
The artwork shows how elements of composition and chromatic balance have been reinterpreted and completely transformed with irreverent imagination in order to capture the passing of time in one single image. For example, the wall painting created specifically by Nicolas Party creates a surreal representation of the Still-life genre where enormous artificially colored fruit brings viewers into a dreamlike, childish world. While photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans show how Still-life images are transformed capturing daily life and the remains of human presence in space. Ori Gersht’s video and photographic productions show the inescapable connection between violence and beauty through the sudden explosion of still-life imagery that seems to come right out of the finest Flemish paintings of the 1600’s. Hans Peter Feldmann creates a tableau vivant of small vases of artificial flowers emphasizing the pictorial nature of objects that surround us, while two emerging talents, Santo Tolone and Elisa Strinna, have ironically reclaimed a classical iconography only to transform it into something else. Still-life artwork by Mat Collishaw represents “The Last Supper” requested by a number of death row inmates in the United States highlighting the profound relationship between who we are and what we choose to eat and drink.
