Galleria Franco Noero is pleased to present A Clown Jumped into the Arena, Anna Boghiguian's first solo exhibition at the gallery, which takes place both indoors, in the spaces of Via Mottalciata, and outdoors, in a garden set into a former industrial site a few steps away from the indoor premises of the gallery.

A multifaceted artist and an inveterate traveler, Boghiguian is best known for her drawings, paintings, collages, and large-scale complex installations. Her practice, which on the one hand can be seen as an attempt to map the world that surrounds us, more often combines figuration and writing through a spontaneous, almost immediate act and the use of saturated and vivid colors. The narratives constructed and displayed by Boghiguian are dense with the artists's personal thoughts, historical and political references, poetry and critique, depicting a world in constant movement and resulting in an eminently unique interpretation of the modern era.

The exhibition brings together a selection of works that focus on some of the themes that are most dear to the artist forming an intense dialogue between recent works and others made specially for the occasion. Encompassing a wide heterogeneity of materials such as cast iron, bronze, glass, resin, fabric and papier-mâché, the new bodies of work find their expression in numerous techniques that simultaneously represent the distinctive characteristic of Boghiguian's oeuvre and in turn complement it, reflecting her personal interpretation and outlook of a world in ceaseless transformation.

A text has been specially written by the artist to accompany the exhibition, becoming the most appropriate inspired poetical introduction to it.

Clowns, buffons or dwarfs once upon a time entertained royalty.
Royalty lived a compromised reality. Between falsehood and truth. If truth is silence words pollute.
The ruler, as a clown, introspects his essence. His country becomes a circus, his arena. On stage he tells story of victory.
He holds the string of power.
The mass chooses to turn into wood: they catch fire, they turn into ash. He has no longer an audience.
He cleans his whitewashed face. The heavy mascara, the red lipstick. The limelight falls on his deadly complexion. He becomes an eye a vision, a memory a forgotten silhouette, an illusion of time past.

The artist was recently awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize given annually by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.