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Valeria Belvedere
Via Rossini 3, 20122 Milano
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Italy
Tel.++39 02 795626
Fax++39 02 795626
Hours: Tue.-Sat- 3pm/7pm and by appointment
Contact: Valeria Belvedere e Lucia Veronesi
E-mail: valeriabelvedere@libero.it
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| Valeria Belvedere |
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David Rickard nowhere to run nowhere to hide
From January 15, David Rickard, a young New Zealand artist currently living and working in London, is hosting an exhibition at the Valeria Belvedere gallery entitled nowhere to run nowhere to hide.
As the title indicates, the show aims to express, on both physical and metaphorical planes, the state of insecurity, instability, and claustrophobia induced by the lack of escape routes available to both the individual artist and the global art situation as a whole. On display in the gallery are two columns made from canvas. Stacked one on top of the other, they reach right up to the ceiling, giving the impression, almost, that they are holding it up. As two completely new architectural elements, these columns overthrow the standard hierarchy that exists between the walls, which act as the support, and the painting that hangs upon it (“Is it not, perhaps,” pones Rickard, “painting, and art in general, which support galleries, in both the spiritual and economic sense, rather than vice versa?”). Other works are displayed alongside this installation that provide no respite form this sense of the gallery’s precariousness: you are so beautiful you make my head spin, in which a pink frame with a mirror set at its center turns continually clockwise, thus allowing for no reflected extension of the gallery space, and permits visitors to see only dizzying, spinning images of themselves; 200 places to hang a picture, two hundred hooks that symbolize the multitude of ways in which a work of art can be hung, with nothing hanging from them; seamless door, a handle that seals up a wall, closing it to any possible use, and once again emphasizing the impossibility of escape; pretty as a picture, an oil-on-canvas painting whose title finds its origin in the still widely used old English saying defining absolute “beauty” — the artist gives his own interpretation of the expression, which explores the constantly changing nature of this ideal throughout the history of art. All the works on display consider the ambiguous relationship between the artist and the art-lover, between art and the art world (understood not only as the exhibitive framework, but also as the place that “validates” an artwork, rendering it thus by means of a convention that the public accepts without question), in an attempt to offer a new way of seeing artworks, one which demolishes arbitrary rules and abandons obligatory viewpoints.
David Rickard was born in Ashburton, New Zealand in 1975. He lives and works in London. Amongst his most recent exhibitions are: State House (1998), Art Space, Auckland, New Zealand; Light Box (1999), Spazio Naos, Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan; Glocal (1999), Studio Casoli, Milan; Glocal (1999), XXL Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria; Seamless (2001), street installations in twelve different locations throughout London, Great Britain.
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nowhere to run nowhere to hide
2001
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