Galleria Franco Noero

VIA MOTTALCIATA 10/B
10154, TORINO
ITALY

Costa Vece
This was not the end

06 May — 19 June 2010

This was not the end is the title of Costa Vece’s new project for the Galleria Franco Noero, for which the Swiss artist has produced a new series of sculptures and works on paper.


The will of documenting unusual aspects of the world culture, social transformations, new architectural landscapes, or the changes carried out by changing political visions and by international news items, are all distinctive features of the photographic reportages published by magazines like ‘Life’ in the United States of ‘Du’ in Europe. In these a vision of the present time gave shape to the one of a future full of expectations.


It is from this kind of sensibility and material that Costa Vece has drawn to create a new series of collages in which pictures from magazines and from anthropology books are folded in half, cut out or literally ‘holed’.


Superimposing one page on another, the cut away elements of one picture are substituted by others of a completely different quality and nature, creating a visual fade out that works like overlapping memories, outlining silhouettes narratively intertwined in order to trace geometries in the human condition.


Typical of Costa Vece’s practice is to let actions tied to his personal experience be reflected in a much wider overview of social experience, this attitude translated later in installations and objects that activate a mutual relationship between them, their surrounding space and the viewer. Having quitted smoking led the artist to chew nicotine gums with which he has then created little sculptures half between the abstract dispersion of forms in the space and the memory of natural incrustations and accumulations, or of miniature Golems. Each of them is associated to a piece of furniture on which they rest -a lamp, a stool, a vitrine, a wicker basket, a night table and so on- chosen not to reveal or show their design qualities, but as an expression of domestic familiarity, common to the repeated gesture of chewing.

 

Costa Vece (Herisau, CH, 1969) lives and works in Zürich. Amongst his solo and group shows in international public Institutions: ‘Life in the Grip of Art’, CAPC, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux (2010); ‘Why does my heart feel so bad?’, Binz 39, Zürich; ‘Carpe Diem, Art and Research’, Palácio do Marques, Lisbon (2009); ‘Revolución-Patriotismo Mandala’, Fondazione Merz, Turin (2008); ‘Research and Invention’, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur; ‘Ironia Domestica’, Museion, Bolzano (2007); ‘Heaven can wait’, Kunstmuseum Solothurn (2006); ‘War is over’, GAMeC, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2005); ‘La fin du mond’, Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt; ‘Costa Vece’, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City; ‘House of cards’, Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona (2004); ‘Look back in anger’, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; ‘Tirana Bienale 1’, Tirana; ‘Squatters’, Museu Serralves, Porto and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2001); ‘Aperto over all’, 48. Biennale di Venezia, Venice (1999)

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