RITAURSO Artopiagallery is pleased to present UNDER OVER THROUGH, a group show with works by Emiliano Aversa, Jesse Benson, Adam Henry, Beatriz Olabarrieta, Naoki Sutter-Shudo and Priscilla Tea, curated by Domenico de Chirico.
Xavier Hufkens presents its inaugural exhibition with the influential American artist Sherrie Levine. As one of the artists who are most often cited in relation to appropriation art, it has to be recognized this category is too narrow to contain all that Levine’s work achieves. The more it is looked at, the more depth and complexity her practice yields.
When a sardine can look back, when a piece of stone starts smiling at you, when a mute idol starts to speak, that is the moment when the object suddenly appears as something uncanny and transforms into something else, revealing it’s non-objectifiable depth, as W.J.T. Mitchell writes in his book ‘What Do Pictures Want?
The exhibition of Italian artist, curator and organiser operating also under the label 63rd-77th STEPS, opens up the theme of social origin in a resolute, but undogmatic way. Abstracted from cheap decorations typical for Southern Italy‘s lower classes, and often related to rituals dividing life between everyday misery and times of celebration, this iconography constitutes traditional gender and family roles, duties as well as vanishing privileges. Santacroce’s installation is an aestheticizing portrait, both critical and empathetic, underlining a certain sense of sentimentality and vulnerability, but always escaping romanticisation. Santacroce’s work is filled with working class ethos but also a certain courteous nihilism.
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