Opening: Thursday 12 October
From 13 October until 18 November 2017
EL GATO CHIMNEY – Eterno ritorno
curated by Michela D’Acquisto
Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is proud to present in Little Circus, the gallery’s project room, Eterno Ritorno, the special project of the Italian artist El Gato Chimney, curated by Michela D’Acquisto.
An essential element of El Gato Chimney’s artistic practice is the research that the artist incessantly carries on by classifying the results of his studies into an archive composed of both objects and merely mental associations that, just like in Warburg’s Bilderatlas, connect through not immediately perceivable affinities the matters he deals with: popular culture, the myth, natural history, and the way in which they intersect and repeat themselves.
By showing, alongside the works generated by this process, the process itself in the entirety of each phase, it becomes art, thus freeing itself from the supporting role that would see it banished to the simple preparatory stage, and instead turning into the emblem of the importance that the aforementioned underground activity assumes in his work.
Driven by the same taxonomic impulse that has always pushed man to organize nature in the hope of making it his own, El Gato Chimney uses the method of cataloging to highlight the correspondences that govern the relationship between the idea and the work of art.
The folkloric figure of the dancing bear is in fact a brilliant narrative stratagem to illustrate this hidden mechanism, as the bear itself represents the winter hibernation and the summer vitality, indissoluble one from the other, that follow each other in an eternal return not unlike that of the circularity of human thought.
In Eterno Ritorno, the artist thus presents a complex examination on the archive as an art form, while at the same time making us aware of the inescapable impossibility of human attempts to dominate the animal world.
On show large-format watercolors and a site-specific installation.
The exhibition opens on Thursday, October 12 at 18.30
until
from Tuesday to Friday: from 10 to 13 and from 15 to 19 – Saturday: from 15 to 19
El Gato Chimney was born in 1981 in Milan, where he lives and works.
Self-taught, with a background as a street artist abandoned in favor of a more introspective exploration in the studio, he dedicates his time to the research of a wide variety of subjects: primitive and sacred art, esoterism and spiritualism, folklore, magical realism in literature.
He has exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, such as: 2017, Animal Kingdom, William Baczek Fine Arts, Northampton; HEY!, Galerie Arts Factory, Paris; The Wild Wood, James Freeman Gallery, London; 2016, Don’t Wake Daddy XI, Feinkunst Krüger, Hamburg; Language Of The Birds: Occult And Art, 80WSE Gallery, New York University, New York; Nothing Is Real, MAO Museo D’Arte Orientale, Torino; The Forest Fire, Galería Combustión Espontánea, Madrid; 2015, De Rerum Natura, Stephen Romano Gallery, New York; Mappa Dell’Arte Nuova, Fondazione Cini, Venezia; Not Man The Less, But Nature More, Summerhall, Edinburgh; Opus Hypnagogia: Sacred Space Of The Visionary And Vernacular, Morbid Anatomy Museum, New York; Praestigium Italia – Imago Mundi, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino; Preternatural History, Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milano; 2014, Mal D’Africa, Ego Gallery, Lugano; Metapsychic Paths, Galería Combustión Espontánea, Madrid; Mysterium Cosmographicum, Stephen Romano Gallery, New York; 2013, Crossroads, Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milano; Immagini D’Io, Triennale Di Milano, Milano; and has participated in international art fairs, including Artefiera, Bologna; Pulse, Miami; Scope, New York; The Metro Show, New York.
Among the publications: Nothing Is Real (2016, Silvana Editore, Italy); The Encyclopedia Of Fernal Affairs (2015, France); Hunt And Gather (Mark Batty Publisher, 2010, USA); Los Colores Del Underground (Astiberri, 2009, Spain); Arte Contemporanea Volume 7 “Ambienti” (Electa per Repubblica – L’Espresso, 2008, Italy).
