Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Massimo Vitali - New Work

Due Sorelle Motor Boats, 2011  C-print,  240 x 320 cm
18 NOVEMBER 2011 – 28 JANUARY 2012

Massimo Vitali will unveil a striking new collection of photographs in his first UK solo exhibition since 1997 on 18 November at Brancolini Grimaldi.

Vitali has become one of the most celebrated contemporary photographers worldwide, renowned for his large colour prints depicting the crowded beaches and shorelines of the Mediterranean Sea. However, this new series focuses on the natural – rocks, cliffs, waterfalls, caves and quarries. Holidaymakers have been reduced to mere dots, hovering uncomfortably on the shore, or taking shelter in the shadow of monumental natural landmarks. Seen from such a distance, these crowds mimic colonies of mammals – huddles of seals or penguins - washed up on the rocks. The power of nature comes to the fore – in one image people are literally replaced by crashing waves as the tide moves in. Everything is now in flux and the old certainties have been washed away. Our frailty in the face of such power is thrown into focus and we are forced to confront our mortality and our inability to resist the forces of nature.

Vitali started his series of large format photographs at a specific moment in Italian history: 1994, the year in which Berlusconi came to power. He has said of this moment, “I wanted to look into the faces of the people that voted for Berlusconi and see if I could understand why. My photography comes from absolute matter-of-fact situations, but also from a deep curiosity that I possess for people, for what they do and how they think.” For Vitali, the beach was a place where the mundane and everyday merges with natural beauty, and where he could confront Italians in a place of vulnerability. The images reflect a sense of freedom, even hedonism, but also a sense of conformity and even banality. In the background, industrial buildings such as factories and warehouses loom, a reminder that the escape to nature is temporary and artificial.

Over the last 15 years, the subtle shift in Vitali’s work from crowds to sparsely populated landscapes, seems an attempt to understand how we can avoid colonising that which makes our environment meaningful and balanced, and an almost Romantic vision of the sublime power of nature.

About the artist:


Vitali was born in Como, Italy, in 1944. After studying photography at the London School of Printing he worked as a photojournalist in the early sixties and enjoyed a career in cinematography for television and cinema in the 1980s. His training in cinematography had a major influence on the way he approached photography when he returned to it in the mid 90s, particularly in the high level of technical precision he demanded in his image-making. After working with large format photography in 1993, Vitali commenced his series of Italian beach panoramas in 1995, coinciding with a period of dramatic political change in Italy. Since then he had major solo exhibitions around the world and his prints are included in various major international collections. Massimo Vitali currently lives and works in Lucca, Italy, and in Berlin, Germany.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Brancolini Grimaldi at Paris Photo 2011 stand B30

Paris Photo 2011

Thursday 10 November - Sunday 13 November
Grand Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris Booth B30

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Roy Arden - The Homosexual Who Wrecked an Empire


Life's Rich Tapestry, 2009

Roy Arden

The Homosexual Who Wrecked an Empire

7 October - 12 November, 2011

Brancolini Grimaldi is delighted to announce Roy Arden's first solo exhibition in London; a Wunderkammer of new work including collages, drawings, paintings, sculpture and video. One of Canada’s most respected artists, Arden is perhaps most well known in the UK for his photographic work from the 1990s that depicted the changing urban landscape o...f Vancouver as the city was being transformed by re-development with the boom in real estate. Arden has described these photographs works “...as battle scenes, like war landscapes, but it’s the economic war,”

Over the last decade Arden has widened his artistic practice to include collages, videos, paintings, sculpture and web-based projects. However, even though his working practice is becoming more diverse, certain themes continue to run though his work. These are history, modernity and the archive. Arden has created his own immense archive of images, that he has collected from newspapers, magazines and the internet that he continually uses in his different series of works. One work in particular, the web-based project made in 2004 entitled The World as Will and Representation, included over 28,000 jpegs, and is now recognized as a seminal work.

Driven by a personal necessity, Arden delves into the trash heap of history for images that reveal something about how and why we arrived at our present predicament. Arden’s paper collages are intimate in scale and seem to channel the history of collage while entertaining various subjects through their kaleidoscope of cut and torn fragments. His digital collages are generally more orderly and speak of the need to archive and its attendant folly. Arden’s more recent paintings and drawings present singular images in a graphic style similar to early Pop Art but always with critical intent. His recent sculptures, constructed from discarded, often rusty objects, appear as though they are the idiosyncratic creations of a bricoleur or rag & bone man with spare time and imagination. This exhibition will also premiere a new video projection entitled Jalopy (2011) which features an antique wind-up Model A Ford toy performing a seemingly demonic routine.

Roy Arden was born in Vancouver in 1957. He completed a Masters of Fine Arts degree under Jeff Wall at the University of British Columbia in 1990. His work can be found in numerous public collections in North America and Europe, including The National Gallery of Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. He has exhibited in dozens of international exhibitions from New York to Sharjah and Berlin to Sydney. In 2007 the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted a survey show of his work covering the period 1981-2007. His last exhibition in the UK was a survey of works from 1985-2000 at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2006.

Arden’s work can be viewed on his website at www.royarden.com and his image blog at www.royarden.com/blog/index.php

For more images from the exhibition go to: http://www.brancolinigrimaldi.com/section/artists/roy-arden/images

Monday, September 5, 2011

Archiv Peter Piller fall opening exhibition



Archiv Peter Piller

Stop

2 September - 1 October, 2011
Photographs you see everyday but take no notice of, photographs that have no value and the photographs that are easily forgotten. These are the photographs that the German artist Peter Piller finds most interesting. These are the photographs that he brings back from oblivion by displaying them in his exhibitions.

It was while he was working as a picture editor for an advertising agency in Hamburg, that Piller assembled a personal archive of thousands of images from German regional newspapers. Using these images without captions, he sorted them into thematic groups like, flower displays, accidents, vandalism, and people receiving retirement gifts; all the activities of everyday life that are reproduced in local newspapers. What Piller has created from these bland images is a typology of events that take place in suburban Germany, that for a short moment appear on the pages of local newspapers than disappear. When viewing these different disparate groups of photographs you become aware of the important role photography plays in defining social beliefs and customs.

Piller’s interest in the unassuming and seemingly unimportant photographs involves more than newspaper photographs. He has made projects that involve using picture postcards and collecting images from the internet. One of his most celebrated projects has been Von Erde schöner (More Beautiful from Above) of aerial photographs of homes that were given to Piller by a company that was hoping to sell the prints back to the homeowners. The business was a failure, so Piller subsequently archived and categorised the images into unusual selections such as homes that were built next to graveyards, homes with swimming pools, homes with tents erected in the garden and homes with red bed linen hanging from windows.

For his first exhibition at Brancolini Grimaldi London he will include work from his newspaper archive, plus photographs from More Beautiful from Above.

Peter Piller was born in Fritzlar in the former West Germany in 1968. He studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, and from 1997 he worked in the media agency Carat, cataloguing regional newspapers. Since 2005 he has taught at Hochschule für Grafik and Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts), Leipzig where in 2006 he was appointed Professor of Photography. Piller was awarded the 2006 Bâlose Art Prize presented at the Art Statement of Art Basel for his project Unresolved Cases, and in 2004 he received the Ars Viva Award from by the Federation of German Industries. In 2007 Christoph Keller Editions and JRP|Ringier published a 348-page book entitled Archiv Peter Piller: Zeitung that featured many of the newspapers images that Piller has collected and catalogued. A 320-page book of the project Von Erde schöner (More Beautiful from Above) was published by Revolver in 2004 that included 313 colour prints. He has had many one-person exhibitions and currently (25 June – 28 August, 2011) has a large survey exhibition of his work at the Kunstverein Braunschweig.


Massimo Vitali on Wallpaper* top 150

The 150 movers, shakers and makers that have rocked the Wallpaper* world in the last 15 years

"So here they are, the 150 people who have come into all our lives over the 15 years since the first Wallpaper* issue and made something that matters to us better, more interesting, or more fun. But, in a Wallpaper* first, these aren’t just our choices. Through the wonders of the Twittersphere, we shot a number of our suggestions out there to provoke debate and input into our great name-checking project. And you came back in numbers and with a lot to say. So this list is, we like to think, the collective hip hip hoorays of the big, happy Wallpaper* family."


Friday, July 8, 2011

Domingo Milella at the Discovery Awards 2011

Domingo Milella - Discovery Awards 2011, Les Rencontres d'Arles


Milella’s photography shows us the physiognomy of a landscape as determined by its physical, anthropological, biological and ethnic characteristics resulting out of the constant action and interaction between nature and mankind. There is a layering of themes and periods, of structures and relics, of nature and manufactured, of the urban and the rural, of beauty and decay, of intimacy and distance, of modernity and antiquity, of the present and of the passage of time.
Artur Walther

My intention for the Discovery Award 2011 in Arles is to show a selection of the most concise and evocative images of my body of work. I have been photographing landscapes, human as well as natural, for ten years now. On this occasion I would like to show a selection of the most important images of this decade. A concept, a skeleton, a chronology of the themes, subjects and layers that constitute my vision and quest. I would like to create a simple index that shows the consistency and wideness of my project. I would like to be able to compress this idea in thirty small photographs and a couple of very large works. I would like to show a horizon of small images that connect my whole body of work: from city views of Italy, Mexico City, Ankara and Cairo, as far as marginal and natural views of Sicily, Tunisia, Albania and Turkey. What is contemporary about these places? What history and memory do they hold? Identity, memory and history are the roots of these landscapes and the core of my visions. For me, it’s a great privilege to photograph landscapes, it’s a possibility to enrich my sense of orientation in the middle of such a confused and fast contemporary age. I trust the language of things, nature and architecture. I feel the need of an alternative imagery, looking for a sense of identity, a culture that is modern and old at the same time. A vision that should be easy to share with others.
Domingo Milella

Monday, July 4, 2011

Sophy Rickett: Auditorium and selected works


Sophy Rickett: Auditorium and selected works

Private view: Wednesday 6 July 7–9pm

Exhibition: 7 July – 27 August

Monday, June 13, 2011

Massimo Vitali - Book Signing

How to Spend It - Finders Keepers

Isabella Brancolini and Carlo Gentili on collecting Contemporary Photography.

A collector's interest in photographic art is piqued after a serendipitous meeting with a gallerist.

Claire Wrathall reports.
Photograph by Dan Burn-Forti



Alaska Editions Launch Party

Wednesday, June 8th 2011 from 6pm til 9pm

Veronique Rolland '6'


Special Artist Edition (Box Set with original print), Edition of 6 worldwide plus 2 APs
Artist Edition (Set in linen bag), edition of 36 worldwide plus 2 APs


LOST
AND
FOUND
by Patrick and Tristram Fetherstonhaugh


A photographic documentation of the Petrie Museum's
pottery collection. 35 photographs in a three box set with
essays by Simon Baker, Head of Photography at Tate Modern
and Stephen Quirke, Curator at the Petrie Museum.

Published by Sébastien Montabonel for Alaska Editions

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Sophy Rickett at the Venice Biennale

Sophy Rickett at the Venice BiennaleSophy Rickett from To The River

To The River by Sophy Rickett

Vernissage: Friday, 3 June 2011 / 6:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.
ArtSway's New Forest Pavilion
Palazzo Zenobio
Fondamenta del Soccorso
Dorsoduro 2596, Venezia
Previews: 1-3 June 2011
Public: 4-26 June 2011
Time: 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Lara Baladi at the Venice Biennale

Lara Baladi at the Venice BiennalePenelope's Labour
Weaving Words and Images


Venezia Fondazione Giorgio Cini
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore

Opening: Tuesday May 31st 2011 at 5.30pm

Domingo Milella at the Venice Biennale

Domingo Milella at the Venice BiennaleDomingo Milella, Polignano a mare, Italy, 2008

Pino Pascali. Return to Venice / Apulia Contemporary Art

Collateral Event of the 54th. International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia

Opening: Friday, June 3, 7 p.m.

Location: Palazzo Michiel dal Brusà, Strada Nova 4391/A, Cannaregio, Venice

Opening days and hours: June 1 through August 7, 2011 - 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. - closed on Mondays

Preview: June 1-2-3, 2011


Clare Strand - Sleight

Girl in Two Halves
Fibre based lambda print, 101 x 127 cm, Edition of 5

Clare Strand - Sleight

Private view: Thursday 26 May 2011, 7–9pm

Exhibition: 27 May – 2 July

Monday, May 30, 2011

Gallery Opening - Marie Amar with sculptures by Pino Pascali

Gallery Opening - Marie Amar with sculptures by Pino PascaliMarie Amar, La Poussière, 4.4.2008 ICP (D+S)
C-print, 121.5 x 152.5 cm, Edition of 5


Marie Amar

With scupltures by Pino Pascali

7 April - 30 May 2011

Private View: Thursday 7th April, 6.00 - 8.00pm