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closed Oscar Giaconia. Hoysteria

The show

Curated by Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni

GAMeC - Bergamo Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art presents Hoysteria , Oscar Giaconia 's first solo show (Milan, 1978) in an Italian museum institution.

The title of the exhibition - a survey of the artist's most recent pictorial production - is a "word suitcase" that contains a fusion of "tavern" , "oyster" and "hysteria" , terms that allude to containers of different nature, capable of to welcome some kind of guest. The conceptual and phonetic assonance that unites these words produces an untranslatable title, a linguistic misunderstanding, a dysfunction of meaning embodied in the figures that inhabit the exhibition.

Innkeepers, forgers, old boatswain, sentinels, ghosts , monsters are the subjects that populate the Spazio Zero of the GAMeC, staging a contemporary degeneration of genre painting.

The path opens with the diptych Master - Mother Board (2018), a double portrait with profile effigies, of numismatic matrix: the Father and the Mother, "hosts", welcome visitors at the entrance scrutinizing and carefully monitoring their movements .

Inside, the whole space is "contaminated" by the salpa, a derivative of leather that arises from the processing of scraps of leather fibers of bovine origin, the best known application of which is that of reinforcement / filling / interior: a resultant material which is born not to be seen and which here, on the contrary, covers everything. The color of this product also pours onto the walls of the room, creating a material continuity, a real container for the works. The salpa tries to camouflage the space by mimicking the camouflage silhouettes of The Grinder (2015), anamorphic spots that stand out against a light background, full of simulated erasures and regrets.

At the center of the exhibition space is what appears to be the mammoth taxidermy of a Calabiyau sewer pipe (2018), and the wooden reconstruction of an old tavern, also sheathed in the same ghost material. A shed-armor inhabited and surrounded by singular characters already present in embryonic form in the Green Room exhibition (BACO, 2016) , when the artist was transformed by the prosthetic make-up artist Vittorio Sodano into a series of paradoxical stand-ins - Commander, Disinfestatore, Monomane, Fisherman - destined to collapse one into the other. If Green Room was the pretext to activate a series of processes of which painting is the terminal point, the subsequent pictorial processing of the mutation it underwent led to the creation of The Grinder (2018), here grafted and kept inside the shed.

The path leads to an environment that hosts the screening of Sexual Clumsiness , a 16mm video that shows offal from the shooting of the prosthetic make-up session. The works of the Sexual Clumsiness of Amphibious Machine (2017) series orbit around the make-up artist's table, alluding to metamorphosis, recycling, decomposition, at the moment of undressing which, psychotically, follows that of disguise.

Giaconia's linguistic obsession is expressed through the use of heterogeneous materials such as silicone, vulcanite, nylon, neoprene rubber, salpa, elastomers, revealing the persistence and empirical obstinacy of his research and his pictorial practice, a visual thought animated by artificiality.

Psychotic accumulations of objects, plastic obsessions and machinic automatisms offer the ground to make the work grow on itself, a compost made of imaginaries to be plumbed and vivisected, giving rise to synthetic biological creatures that represent the backbone of his works.

On Saturday 23 February 2019, Vittorio Sodano, the twice-nominated prosthetic make-up artist, will transform Giaconia again as part of a performance hosted in the museum's Spazio Zero, which will trigger the new pictorial machine at the base of the artist's next work.

Timetable and tickets

Address

Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo

Contacts


Other exhibitions in Bergamo

scheduled date_range undefined

Naples to Bergamo

From 23 April 2024 to 01 September 2024

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