23.05 – 19.07.2002
DORMICE – Dormicelab
We don’t want to defend ourselves against any risk – in fact, we’re looking for collective risk.
Art is a spiritual experience, an apparition.
It has led us to work together, anything else is unthinkable for us.
DORMICE®
DORMICE® is a group formed in Vienna in 1999 by three artists: Dougal Graham, Heinrich Nicolaus, Sawan Yawnghwe, from Europe, America and Asia.
They live and work in Vienna, Paris and Panzano in Chianti, in workshop-studios that are active 24 hours a day. The DORMICE® have a particular aptitude for making everything jibe: music with sports, tags with fashion, art history with war, recipes with Caravaggio-like tones. There is no simulation, no posing of the subjects: the coexist peacefully on the canvas, because they were born in a chorus, polygamous, pantheists, born Gregorian, polyphonic, in stereo, in Dolby-surround. There is nothing that fails to interest the DORMICE®, and to tell the truth perhaps art is not even at the top of their charts.
The group lives DORMICE®, thinks DORMICE®, listens to DORMICE® music, chooses DORMICE®. Every day.
Therefore the show presents not only the pictorial works, but the entire world of DORMICE® with their music, their logo, their favorite magazines and catalogues, their habitat, demonstrating how the group is capable of re-creating a temperature that is theirs in any place.
The entire building of Galleria Antonio Colombo in Milan will be “translated” into the DORMICE® language, through an installation of works and objects that help the spectator to get in tune with the spirit of the group. The show, though it contains a large number of painted works of different sizes (about 30), will not be a traditional exhibition, but a place in which to meet to live a different experience of painting. The DORMICE® undeniably live in a particular state of mind, so full of stimuli, intuitions, provocations and deductions that the DORMICE® themselves, in spite of their incessant work, can never exhaust the supply.
Often they find themselves running well ahead of their work itself.
The show is an exhibition of the painting of the DORMICE®, which has “overflowed” a bit, scattering fragments of the world in its vicinity.
For this occasion the mixtures assumes the name of DORMICELAB
Don’t miss this appointment with the thought, taste, colors and images of the contemporary planet.
MAIN “SOLO” SHOWS: in 1999 at the Ernst Hilger Gallery in Vienna, Third Avenue Gallery in Vancouver; in 2000 at the gallery of Alessandro Bagnai in Siena, Museo delle Papesse in Siena and Galleria Carini in Rimini; in 2001 at Galleria Carini di Rimini and Galleria Miscetti in Rome. In 2002 at the Hernst Hilger Gallery in Paris. In 2003 they will be at the gallery of Fernando La Torre in Saragoza.
MAIN GROUP SHOWS: in 1999 “Spiele” at the Burgenlaendisches Landesmuseum Eisenstadt in Austria; in 2000 “A l’ordere du jour” at the Grand Palais in Paris; at Polilab Caserta and the Museo Civico Pio Capponi of Terracina. In 2001 “Le tribù dell’arte” at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome; in 2002 “Geipeg” at Galleria Dina Carola in Naples, and “Recycling” at the Ufbahn Postdamer Platz in Berlin.
