Contemporary Art in Florence
Until the 15th of July, Florence Palazzo Stozzino exhibits “American Dreamers. Reality and Imagination in Contemporary American Art”. The exhibition is organized by the Centro di Strozzina Contemporary Culture and the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, and intends to analyze the new generation of American artists and their reality, while focusing on what was called “the American dream.”
This exhibition curated by Bartholomew F. Bland, analyzes whether the current economical situation in the U.S. allows Americans to still believe in the American dream, especially when the promise of prosperity and equality seems to have disappeared.
To analyze from an artistic point of view the vanished from American way of life, eleven American artists, through fantasy, imagination and dreams transmit their particular points of views on the crisis in American society. Furthermore, since their creations, they built those symbolic worlds that are required to transform the look of the contemporary, often oblivious to the greatest problems, and the same that sometimes return to be processing utopias.
The eleven artists invited to this exhibition are: Adrien Broom, Nick Cave, Adam Cvijanovic, Laura Ball, Will Cotton, Thomas Doyle, Richard Deon, Christy Rupp, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Mandy Greer y Patrick Jacobs.
Will Cotton was born in Melrose, Massachusetts in 1965. Study at the School of Fine Arts in Rouen, France, and at the New York Academy of Art. He is a painter; draftsman and sculptor who work with surreal dream images appealing to the concept of pleasure.
Kirsten Hassenfeld does interesting sculptures, usually very delicate, with an air of decorative art for the beauty that give the spaces. She works on paper sculptures that look like Chinese lanterns, giving the space a dreamlike, unreal.
Laura Ball is a painter that works with watercolors, creating a chaotic structure that constantly changes. Birds flying between tangled trunks and snakes intermingle with countless unidentifiable things are part of her jobs. Her work is very beautiful and with a feminine nature.
Adrien Broom is a self-taught photographer who has specialized in fantastic photography, while creating fictional worlds. In his images of women wrapped in fabrics that float, women with butterfly wings or children in a landscape of leaning trees, is the permanent movement that seeks Broom in their work.
Mandy Greer creates installations with fabrics, which add buttons, beads, plastic and small bright objects to give her work a sense of nature. Her works are a delicate architecture where various fibers intertwine installed on people to give shape and meaning to the work.
Patrick Jacobs creates small dioramas (3 inches) enclosed in magnifying glasses that are embedded in the walls of the exhibition spaces. It is painstaking work that takes several weeks to achieve stunning realism.
Christy Rupp is a sculptor and works with glass to build functional sculptures for public spaces. Her concern for the ecology is clearly expressed on her works.
For more information http://www.strozzina.org/exhibitions/american-dreamers/
Nancy Guzman
If you´re planning to stay in apartments in Florence during your holiday, do not miss this excellent exhibition at the Palazzo Stozzino.
