Until the 25th of September the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice exhibits Repertorio Ornamentale by the Italian artist Enrico David. Milovan Ferronato curates this exhibition with the collaboration of the Michael Werner Gallery from New York and the artistic support of Fiorucci and Vhernier.
This exhibition is an important part of the work done by David inside and outside Italy. His personal iconography, ranging from pop to surrealism, plays with the imagination of life fragmentation and dreams by using strange dolls, fragmented bodies and hybrid figures coming straight out from a child’s nightmare. The artist also uses various media such as collage or sculpture to express his deep feelings.
David´s particular work includes embroidery on canvas, paintings, collages or papier mâché sculptures, that this time will be exhibited at Palazzetto Tito room, an ideal space to show the thickness of the artist born in Ancona, Italy, in 1966. During the late 80´s David took his ideas and went to study at the art and design school Central Saint Martin in London, in which he exhibited his first samples in alternative art galleries, as well as in private galleries.
His works include sculpture, painting, installation, design and drawing. His anthropocentric images are able to move, surprised and are supported by various and versatile media.
Repertorio Ornamentale corresponds to the work performed by David during his residency at Laurenz Foundation-Haus in Basel. He masterfully explores the enclosures and attitudes of the viewer divided between the origin and belonging of his work; terms that arise from the very beginning of its creation.
During this residency program David explored the representations of the linguistic concepts, focused in generating significance of art for the public and the way it melts into his work.
One of his most acclaimed works is Chicken Man Gong, which was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London. The installation presented in the sculptures courtyard in 2005, it consists of a circular form painted in black with a human face on one side, a colored tail opposite the face and a bell that hangs over the center. This work is an attempt to highlight his subjectivity in the ambiguous and dissonant space of a gallery, where the public is not so private and the private disappears outside the place.
This work was described as a prodigious outpouring of creativity that gives way to a new language, which is discovering aesthetic and cultural concepts from design elements, semiotics and the use of simple elements, almost handmade.
It is perhaps this naïve feature, through the use of simple materials and craftsmanship that gives a special stamp to his work; full of color and filled with plenty of images that seem to come from comic magazines.
For more information http://www.bevilacqualamasa.it/enricodavid
Nancy Guzman
Una maravillosa exposición para asistir y disfrutar de las lúdicas formas que Enrico David ocupa para comunicar su subjetividad. Así que si se encuentra en apartamentos en Venecia, este es un buen panorama de diversión con sentido y belleza.