GALLERY PETER BLUM
LUISA RABBIA
PETER BLUM GALLERY
LUISA RABBIA
Born 1970 in Pinerolo (Torino, Italy) Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2020 From Mitosis to Rainbow, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2018 Death&Birth, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2017 Love, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (catalogue) 2016 Territories, Frieze Art Fair, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY A Matter of Life, RLWindow, Ryan Lee Gallery, New York, NY 2014-15 Drawing, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Waterfall, installation for the façade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA Everyone, Studio Eos, Rome, Italy 2012 Coming and Going, Peter Blum Chelsea, New York, NY 2010 Luisa Rabbia, Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina, curated by Beatrice Merz (catalogue) You Were Here. You Were There, Galerie Charlotte Moser, Genève, Switzerland 2009 Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella. Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venezia, Italy In viaggio sotto lo stesso cielo, Fondazione Merz, Torino, Italy, curated by Beatrice Merz 2008 Travels with Isabella. Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, curated by Pieranna Cavalchini (catalogue) 2007 Yesterdaytodaytomorrow, Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston, MA Together, Galleria Rossana Ciocca, Milano, Italy Luisa Rabbia, Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, NY 2006 Luisa Rabbia, Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, Spain 2005 ISLANDS, GAMeC Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Raffaele de Grada, San Gimignano, Italy, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva (catalogue) Special Project Arte all'Arte X, Associazione Continua, San Gimignano, Italy Anywhere Out of the World, Galleria Giorgio Persano, Torino, Italy (catalogue) 2004 The last Resort: Luisa Rabbia - David Krippendorff, Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, NY 2003 La Sala degli Specchi, Fondazione Palazzo Bricherasio, Torino, Italy A Matter of Life, Galleria Rossana Ciocca, Milano, Italy 2002 Luisa Rabbia, Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, NY 1999 Luisa Rabbia, Galleria Rossana Ciocca, Milano, Italy A Pillow to talk to Yourself, Torino Galleria Rossana Ciocca, Artissima Art Fair, Torino, Italy, curated by Francesco Bernardelli in collaboration with Castello di Rivoli and GAM (catalogue) 1998 Luisa Rabbia, Perugi Arte Contemporanea, Padova, Italy 1997 Nuovi rumori di fondo, Galleria Rossana Ciocca, Milano, Italy 1995 Proposte X: Ansie Luisa Rabbia - Daniele Galliano, Galleria San Filippo, Torino, Italy, curated by Riccardo Passoni (catalogue) Luisa Rabbia, Studio d'Arte Recalcati, Torino, Italy, curated by Marco Noire
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2021 Una infinita bellezza. Il Paesaggio in Italia dalla pittura romantica all’arte contemporánea, Reggia di Venaria, Piedmont, Italy 2020 Homemade, Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Cold Spring, NY L’opera aperta (The Open Work), curated by Eva Brioschi, Arte Fiera, Bologna, Italy 2019 Collective Memory: A Contemporary Film Series, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA 2018 1Ensemble, Cathouse Proper, Brooklyn, NY Artist Books by CANOPO EDITIONS, Jason McCoy Gallery, New York, NY Manifesta 12, Palazzo Drago, Palermo, Italy L’altro sguardo. Fotografie Italiane 1965-2018., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma, Italy 2017 In Conversation, IUCA+D Gallery, Columbus, Indiana, curated by Stephanie Buhmann 2016 L'umano paesaggio da Guido Reni a Kiki Smith, Biennale del Disegno, Museo della Citta’, Rimini, Italy A Weed is a Plant Out of Place, Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, Ireland, curated by Allegra Pesenti (catalogue) Lifting the Veil, Rosenfeld Porcini Gallery, London In Conversation, Macy Art Gallery, Columbia University, NY, curated by Stephanie Buhmann A Matter of Life, RL Window, Ryan Lee Gallery, New York, NY 2015 E’TUTTO VERO, Fondazione Merz, Torino, Italy, curated by Francesco Bonami In Conversation, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, curated by Stephanie Buhmann SELF: Portraits of Artists in Their Absence, National Academy Museum & School, New York, curated by Filippo Fossati 2014 Traces, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Résonance(s), Maison Particulière, Brussels, Belgium, curated by Collezione Maramotti For The Love of Agnes and Barney Cathouse FUNeral, Brooklyn, NY 2013 Visiting Faculty 2013-14, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 2012 Magic Moments: The Screen and the Eye-9 Artists 9 Projections, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA Paper Band, Jason McCoy Gallery, New York, NY 4 Films, Peter Blum Chelsea, New York, NY Tecnica Mista: Come è fatta l’arte del Novecento, Museo del Novecento, Milano, Italy Points of View: Twenty Years of Artists-in-Residence, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA 2011 LANY, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY, curated by Mario Diacono Tra Arte e Design. Vivere e Pensare in Carta e Cartone, Museo Diocesano, Milano, Italy 2010 Cosa fa la mia anima mentre sto lavorando? Opere d'arte contemporanea nella collezione Consolandi, MAGA, Museo Arte Gallarate, curated by Francesca Pasini and Angela Vettese (catalogue) A vos Papiers, Galerie Charlotte Moser, Genève, Switzerland Heads or Tails, Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY 2009 Wondering where the Ducks went, Galleria Tiziana di Caro, Salerno, Italy Hopes and Doubts, Fondazione Mario Merz, Torino, Italy, curated by Costantino D'Orazio
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2008 Hopes and Doubts, The Dome, Beirut, Lebanon, curated by Costantino D'Orazio XIII Biennale Internazionale. Nient'altro che scultura. Nothing but Sculpture Le nuove statue, Centro Arti Plastiche Internazionali e Contemporaneo, Carrara, curated by Francesco Poli 15 Quadriennale di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma, curated by Chiara Bertola, Lorenzo Canova, Bruno Corà, Daniela Lancioni and Claudio Spadoni 2007 Apocalittici e integrati, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Roma, Italy, curated by Paolo Colombo (catalogue) 2006 Italy made in Art: Now, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva Capolavoro, Palazzo Primavera, Centro per l'arte contemporanea, Terni, curated by Angelo Capasso (catalogue) Fresco Bosco Padula, Certosa di Padula, Padula, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva 2005 Il bianco e altro e comunque arte, Palazzo Cavour, Torino, Italy, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva (catalogue) The Berkus Collection, Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA, curated by Dane Goodman 2004 Arte all'Arte IX: Special Project, Il riposo del tempo, Associaone Continua, San Gimignano, Italy, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and James Putnam (catalogue) 2003 Makeover, Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, NY 2002 Artomi at 9W, Paul Rodgers 9W Gallery, New York, NY Ballpoint, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA Keep your Distance, GSIS Museum ng Sining, Pasay City, Malaysia Next-Art 20 musei scelgono l'arte di domani, Fortino Sant' Antonio, Bari, Italy, curated by Ludovico Pratesi Sala Murat (catalogue) Assab One, Ex Gea, Milano, Italy, curated by Laura Garbarino and Roberto Pinto Amor Vacui, curated by Milovan Farronato and Laura Garbarino; Open Space, Milano, Italy (catalogue) 2001 La GAM costruisce il suo futuro, GAM Galleria di Arte Moderna, Torino, Italy (catalogue) The Viewing Room Gallery, New York, NY Keep your Distance, Le Crédac, Centre d'Art, Ivry-Sur-Seine, France; Moris Gallery, Tokyo, Japan Random Access Memory, DUMBO Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY, curated by Silvia Rocciolo 2000 Where are all the People?, De Chiara/Stewart Gallery, New York, NY Sui Generis, curated by Alessandro Riva, PAC, Padiglione d' Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy Fabulaefabularum, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York, NY, curated by Ombretta Agrò NA.TO, Gale Gates Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, curated by Ombretta Agrò 1999 Biennale dei Giovani Artisti del Mediterraneo, Ex mattatoio, Roma, Italy (catalogue) Alter ego, Italian exponent in Bangkok, Silpakorn Art Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand, curated by A. Somporn Rodboon (catalogue) 1998 Gate 4, Galerie Clark, Montreal, Canada Now Boarding, Galerie Oeil de Poisson, Québec, Canada Bello Impossibile, Associazione Viafarini, Milano, Italy, curated by Alessandra Galasso 1997 Studi Aperti, Docks Dora, Torino, Italy, curated by Beatrice Merz and Maria Centonze In fuga, PAC, Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea, Ferrara, Italy, curated by Riccardo Passoni (catalogue) 1996 Modernità Progetto 2000, Young Artists International Competition, Ex Lanificio Bona, Carignano, Italy (catalogue) Fotografia, curated by Marco Noire, Studio d'Arte Recalcati, Torino, Italy F4: Fantastic Four, Galerie des Arts Visuels, Université Laval, Québec, Canada Autoritratti al femminile, Museo Ken Dami, Brescia
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1994 Accumulazione, Galleria Marco Noire, S. Sebastiano, TO, Italy Territori dell’immagine, Museo Ken Dami, Brescia, Italy (catalogue) Chiamata alle arti, Arcate dei Murazzi, Torino, Italy, curated by Riccardo Passoni Quaranta per quaranta, Galleria Eva Menzio, Torino and Galleria Continua, S.Gimignano, SI, Italy 1992 Soluzione di continuita’, Galleria Filippo Fossati, Torino, Italy
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
2021 Kuspit, Donald. “New York Reviews: Luisa Rabbia”, ARTFORUM, March 2021, pg. 176 Alperin, Jessie Elizabeth. “Nine Works: Luisa Rabbia”, Venti Journal & Collective, Vol. Two, Issue One, “Inhale/Exhale,” Visual Art. 2020 Rosenfeld, Jason. “Luisa Rabbia: ‘From Mitosis to Rainbow’”, The Brooklyn Rail, December 14, 2020. Rabbia, Luisa. “Open Dialogue | Luisa Rabbia: When Did My American Dream Die?”, Espoarte Contemporary Art Magazine (online), December 3, 2020 Cascone, Sarah and Neha Jambhekar. “Editors’ Picks: 19 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week”, artnet news (online), November 10, 2020 Loos, Ted. "At Magazzino, Social Distancing Devices Vibrate. So Does the Art", The New York Times, July 22, 2020 Zuccala, Luca. “Arte balsamo della psiche. La quarantena degli artisti, Luisa Rabbia”, ArtsLife.com, April 30, 2020 2019 In the Company of Artists, Exhibition Catalogue, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, 2019, pgs. 200-205 2018 Pagliuca, Francesca. “Sally Ross and Luisa Rabbia. Dialogando at a Close Distance”, arteecritica (online), June 2018 Russo, Domenico. “Luisa Rabbia: Le costellazioni”, Juliet, April 2018 Gómez, Edward M.. “Luisa Rabbia’s Tiny Marks and Big Mysteries”, Hyperallergic (online), February 17, 2018 Cohen, David. “Featured item from THE LIST: Luisa Rabbia, opening Friday at Peter Blum”, artcritical (online), February 6, 2018 Kotz, Genevieve. “NYC Gallery Scene – Highlights Through February 11, 2018”, Hamptons Art Hub (online), February 6, 2018 Panicelli, Ida. “Reggio Emilia, Italy Reviews: Luisa Rabbia”, ARTFORUM, Janaury 2018 Servi, Paolo. “Mostre - Love di Luisa Rabbia a Reggio Emilia”, VilleGiardini (online), January 31, 2018 2017 Couvreur, Daniel. “Faire une place au génie féminin dans l'art”, Le Soir, Belgium, December 18, 2017 Vittoria Zuliani, Anna. “Silence and noise. Luisa Rabbia and Emma Hart in Reggio Emilia”, Artribune (online), December 14, 2017 Lacava, Erika. “Maramotti Collection: a cutting-edge art collection”, Not Only Magazine (online), December 12, 2017 Macrì, Teresa. “Face to face with the spectator”, il manifesto, December 12, 2017 Bottani, Silvia. “Luisa Rabbia, Una sinfonia universal”, Arte, Cairo Editore, Milano, December, 2017, pg. 126-130 Biolchini, Irene. “Luisa Rabbia and All the Complexity of Love”, Espoarte Contemporary Art Magazine (online), November 27, 2017 Bottani, Silvia. “Love. Draw the painting”, doppiozero (online), November 4, 2017
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Trincia, Daniela. “Luisa Rabbia – Love at the Maramotti Collection”, art a part of cult (ure) (online), November 27, 2017 Russo, Domenico. “Return to Italy. Interview with Luisa Rabbia”, Artribune (online), October 23, 2017 2016 “Critics' Picks: A Weed is a Plant Out of Place”, ARTFORUM, September 2016 Buhmann, Stephanie, “New York Studio Conversations, Seventeen Women Talk About Art” The Green Box, Berlin, March 2016 2014 Buhmann, Stephanie, “A Sense of Kinship: Luisa Rabbia,” Sculpture Magazine, June 2015 “Luisa Rabbia, ‘Drawing’,” Time Out New York, December 29 Marin, Alison, “Luisa Rabbia investigates human psyche at Midtown gallery show,” examiner.com, December 17 2013 “Luisa Rabbia with Stephanie Buhmann,” February 1 Ireland, Corydon, “Six artists, teaching and creating,” Harvard Gazette, September 10 2012 "A Dialogue: Katy Hamer with Luisa Rabbia,” eyes-towards-the-dove.com (online), October 1 Martin, Alison, "Luisa Rabbia's exhibition is 'Coming and Going' to Chelsea gallery", New York Examiner (online), September 10 Johnson, Ken, "4 Films," The New York Times, June 7 Zimmer, Lori, "Passage of Time, Fragility of Memory," Art Slant, May 13 2011 Vargas, Marta Luisa, "An interview with Luisa Rabbia," Vandal, College Station (TX), n. 2, December, pg. 86-95 Berardi, Francesca, "An Italian artist at Art Basel Miami Beach," America 24 (online), December 2010 Bertola, Chiara, Giorgio Guglielmino and Beatrice Merz, Luisa Rabbia: Traveling Under the Same Sky, Hopefulmonster, Torino, Italy, June Pasini, Francesca and Angela Vettese, Contemporary Artworks from the Consolandi Collection: Cosa fa la mia anima mentre sto lavorando?, Mondadori Electa, Verona, Italy, p. 152 Tolve, Antonello, "Avventure Minime," in Miocinesia nell’arte di oggi, with text by G. Dorfles, S. Zuliani, MMMAC Museo per i Materiali Minimi d’Arte Contemporanea, Salerno, Italy, p. 105 Bartorelli, Guido, I miei eroi, note su un decennio di arte da MTV a Youtube 1999-2009, Edizioni Cleup, Padovs, Italy, p. 19, 36, 37, 45, 47, 119 2009 Cavalchini, Pieranna, "In the studio, Luisa Rabbia with Pieranna Cavalchini," Art in America, June - July 2009, pp. 90-95 Harris, Susan, "Luisa Rabbia," in Instant Book, Italian Artist New York, Charta, Milano, Italy, May, pp. 102-3 2008 Merjian, Ara H., "Pick of the Month: Luisa Rabbia, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum," ArtForum (on-line), September Cavalchini, Pieranna, "Blue Roots," in Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Charta, Milano, Italy Guglielmino, Giorgio, "Luisa Rabbia: When a bare tree is the only friend left," in How to look at contemporary art (...and like it), Umberto Allemandi & C., Torino, Italy, pp. 248-49 2007 Harris, Susan, "Luisa Rabbia at Massimo Audiello Gallery," Art in America, June 2006 Capasso, Angelo, Capolavoro, Tipolitografia INAIL, Milano, Italy, May, pp. 95-97 2005 Bonito Oliva, Achille, "Occupazione di suolo, lo sguardo allagato e talvolta negato," in Luisa Rabbia, Galleria Persano, Hopefulmonster, Torino, Italy, November Drake, Cathryn, "Luisa Rabbia," ArtForum, October Oliva, Achille Bonito, Il bianco e altro e comunque arte, Palazzo Cavour, Torino, Italy, Umberto Allemandi & C., October Bonito Oliva, Achille, "Forme del tempo inferiore," in Luisa Rabbia. Islands, GAMe
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Raffaele de Grada, San Gimignano, Titivillus Edizioni, San Miniato, Italy, September 2004 Oliva, Achille Bonito, "I diari dei curatori," in Arte all’Arte X, Associazione Arte Continua, San Gimignano, Edizioni Gli Ori, Prato, Italy, September, pp. 26-27, 38, 178, 187 2002 Schwabsky, Barry, Drafts of water, Edizioni Canopo, Prato, Italy, October Pratesi, Ludovico, Pietro Marino and Livia Semerari, NEXT ART, 20 Musei scelgono l’arte di domani, Laterza, Bari, Italy Garbarino, Laura and Milovan Farronato, "Luisa Rabbia: Un soffio di vita," in Amor Vacui, Comune di Milano settore giovani, pp. 13, 14, 19, 32-35 2001 Gambari, Olga, "Una porta per Torino," in Torino incontra l’arte 2001, Torino, Italy, pp. 18- 21 2000 Bartorelli, Guido and L. Fabbri, Art beat, Edizioni Castelvecchi Arte, Roma, Italy, p. 79 1999 Pasini, Francesca, "Tra la mente e il cuore, il cordone ombelicale," in Luisa Rabbia, Galleria Ciocca, Tipografia Donizzetti, Milano, Italy Rodboon, Somporn, "Notes on Alter Ego," in Alter Ego, Amaring printing and publishing, Bangkok, Thailand, pp. 8, 33 Luisa Rabbia, Turin à Nice, GS Communication SAM, Direction de la culture de Nice, May, pp. 32-33 Visioni del futuro, Biennale dei Giovani Artisti del Mediterraneo, Castelvecchi Arte, Roma, Italy, p. 223 1998 Gallo, Francesco, "Luisa Rabbia," in Vola!, September, pp. 71-81 Montenero, Riccarda, Intorno a Thanatos, Edizioni d'Arti Fratelli Pozzo, Torino, Italy Various Authors., Inattualità dell’arte, Officine Grafiche Visentin, Milano, Italy, April Saccà, Lucilla, Primo incontro Dominico-Italiano d’Arte Contemporanea, Edizioni Stampa 3, Roma, Italy 1997 Passoni, Riccardo, In fuga, Cartografica Ferrara 1996 Conti, Tiziana, Modernità Progetto 2000, Electa, Milano, Italy Fagioli, Laura and Rosetta Marzola, Arti visive concorso nazionale Giovani Artisti, Microart’s Edizioni, July 1995 Passoni, Riccardo, "Luisa Rabbia," in Proposte X: Ansie, Regione Piemonte, Torino, Italy Cerritelli, Claudio, and Luisa Somaini, Giovane Arte Contemporanea. Terza Biennale, Fondazione Sartirana Art, Edizioni Galli Thierry, Milano, Italy, March 1994 Beatrice, Luca., Cristiana Perrella and Guido Costa, Nuova scena - Artisti italiani degli anni novanta, Mondadori, Milano, Italy Merz, Beatrice and Francesco Poli, Torino anni ottanta, Unione Culturale Franco Antonicelli, Torino, Italy Cavellini, Piero, "Luisa Rabbia," in Territori dell’immagine: il corpo, Edizioni Museo Ken Dami, Brescia, Italy, September, pp. 15-17
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS 2021 Art, Design, & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 2020 The Olnick Spanu Collection, New York, NY, USA 2016 Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy 2008 Permanent Installation: The Roots, Passage du secrets, La Maine, Cologny, Genève, Switzerland 2006 Permanent Installation: Augusto Subway Station, Metrò dell'Arte, Napoli, Italy 2005 Permanent Installation: Il riposo del Tempo, Medieval Fountains, San Gimignano, Italy Collection GAMeC, Raffaele de Grada, San Gimignano, Italy 2002 Museo del Novecento, Milano, Italy 1998 GAM Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Torino, Italy
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GRANTS / AWARDS / RESIDENCIES 2020 Homemade, Magazzino da Casa, agazzino Italian Art Foundation, NY [online] 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, NY 2007 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Artist in Residence, Boston, MA 2002 Artist Residency at Artomi, New York, NY 2000-2001 Artist Residency at International Studio Program (ISCP), New York, NY 1999 Italian representant at THAI-EU Contemporary Art Project: Alter ego, Silpakorn Art Gallery, Bangkok , Thailand 1996 Modernità Progetto 2000 Grant, Young Artist International Competition, Palazzo Bricherasio, Torino, Italy
VISITING ARTIST AND LECTURES 2014 Artist Talk, VES, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 2013-2014 Visiting Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 2012 Magic Moments: The Screen and the Eye-9 Artists 9 Projections, in conversation with Pieranna Cavalchini, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA 2009 The Legacy of Arte Povera: Luisa Rabbia and Tacita Dean, Presentation and Film Screening, Tuft University, Medford, MA 2008 Travels with Isabella, in conversation with Pieranna Cavalchini, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA A Two-Part Process, in conversation with Fa Ventilato, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boson, MA
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The relationship between oneself and others, from the micro- to macrocosm, from the physical to the spiritual is fascinating to me. The way our lives are shaped by rationality and unconsciousness, the connection between our present actions and past and future are reflections dear to me because they increase our sense of responsibility and belonging. I approach my work with this same spirit, technically and visually, letting it grow through marks and traces over a surface that always suggests to me where to go in a relation of trust between the known and unknown. I speak of what I feel and experience, but focusing mostly on positive messages that might bring people together rather than apart.
At the core of my research is drawing, where lines, over the course of my career, have extended from works on paper to painting, sculpture and video. Until 2018 mostly of my paintings were executed entirely with colored pencil over a monochromatic layer of acrylic paint laid down, not with brush, but with thick fingerprints. When drawn over, the texture from the fingerprints is highlighted creating detail and visual complexity. In addition to the process described above, recently I began working with oil paint, which has drying times slow enough to allow scratching into the surface, a process of subtraction that reveals what’s underneath.
One reading of the fingerprints is that they are the accumulation of traces, but in different contexts they assume different meanings. In some works they are reminiscent of biometrics
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY which, however, represent the unique identity of individuals without revealing information about gender, race or nationality. In the large-scale paintings, the fingerprints look like microscopic particles, as if the human trace has dissolved into the cosmos mixing with bacteria and dust.
While situated securely in the contemporary moment, ultimately, I seek for an atemporal language, one that motivates humanity beyond the quotidian. I am interested in visual expressions that seek a language of kinship, both socially and ecologically. In a world of fragmentation, I am seeking a discourse that connects, and could possibly raise sentiments of empathy. My work reflects on the self and speaks of inner landscapes that are either protected by boundaries or boundless and open to otherness. Despite the fact that the fingerprints on the surface of my paintings are mine, they extend to dissolution. It is my body (and my sense of responsibility) that spreads, shifting between internal and external, blurring the personal with the collective, the physical with the ethereal.
In Chorus, seven indeterminate figures stand facing the viewer, layering themselves upon the other to create the impression of a single body, a single pulsating diaphragm, and a single vibratory breath that radiates outwards with the expansion and disappearance of bodies. As the title of the painting suggests, these figures are united beyond the layered forms of the composition and join together as one voice, one song, and one company. The very process of respiration joins one to another through the space of shared air and inspiration. Luisa Rabbia’s artwork manifests these spaces in visual, tactile, and emotional forms to draw us into the shared domain of breathing to reflect upon ourselves and our relation to each other. Paintings like Chorus depict both the daily action of unconscious inhalation and exhalation. However, beyond this commonality of breathing, Rabbia expresses an intense spiritual intimacy that encompasses the ethereal life force of breath beyond human form.
These impressions of a deep, yet mysterious intimacy between the personal and collective, as well as the known and the unknown, extend from the macroscopic impression of the paintings to Rabbia’s tactile quality of mark-making. Her works compose a topography of her own
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY fingerprints that haptically map her presence and absence within each painting or drawing. Reimagining familiar landscape scenes with her visceral touch, Rabbia’s multi-layered surfaces use her fingerprints to describe the physical location of her body in relation to each paper or canvas. Yet, definite forms are foregone for the ambiguity of inner psychological drama or emotional energy. The upper supine human form in Death transforms into a tree as their last breaths spark with embers into faded memories. The composition of rootlike forms in Death amid the blue intensity of an oceanic cosmos or starry sky leaves the viewer with the feeling of solitude amidst interconnection, the closeness of touch at a distance, and the notion of those whom we have lost along the way. As much as we see the possibilities of living, the subtlety of Rabbia’s work allows us to remember that there is always a precarity in breathing.
- Jessie Elizabeth Alperin
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Luisa Rabbia
By Donald Kuspit March 2021, page 176
Across nine exquisite and meticulously executed paintings—made with media such as oil, acrylic, colored pencil, and pastel—at Peter Blum Gallery, Luisa Rabbia offered up an original vision of the human body rapturously transfigured. Her works give off an “oceanic feeling,” as French writer Romain Rolland characterized the effect, or, as Sigmund Freud called it in response to Rolland, a “primitive ego-feeling,” a sensation preserved from infancy, when the ego has not yet come into its own and is only beginning to emerge from the id. The imagery in Rabbia’s show, according to the press release, alluded to “interconnected natural processes such as mitosis, forming a thread between microcosms and macrocosms and interweaving them in a nebulous primordial state.” One can easily envision the artist’s colors as biological cells, each one carrying sundry chromosomes of light. But such metaphors are also steeped in the spiritual, as Ecstasy, 2019, a richly rendered canvas depicting a cobalt-colored body seemingly disintegrating into—or becoming one with— the great void of the universe, suggests. “The deeper the blue the more it beckons man into the infinite, arousing a longing for purity and the supersensuous,” Wassily Kandinsky wrote. As André Breton once said, “The marvelous is always beautiful.”
I mention Breton and Kandinsky because Rabbia’s figures have solid roots in classical modernism and to my mind are a consummate statement on the unconscious or, more precisely, what psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl referred to as the “spiritual unconscious.” Blue dominated in virtually every one of Rabbia’s Luisa Rabbia, Mitos, 2018, colored pencil, pastel, and canvases, signaling their affinity with other famous acrylic on canvas, 118 × 53".
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artworks that explored or meditated upon, per Kandinsky, this “color of the heavens,” such as Odilon Redon’s numinous drawing of a woman’s head in profile, La cellule d’or (The Golden Cell), 1892, or Ad Reinhardt’s sublimely nonobjective blue paintings. Rabbia’s radiant Whole, 2019, features an armless, legless ur-human, perhaps freshly birthed from the primeval abyss, who levitates before a variegated backdrop of blood red. The being’s torso seems more shadow than flesh; it is painted in a shade of ultramarine that verges on jet. The subject is a fathomless window, godlike in its way—similar to the figure in Mitos, 2018, a celestial creature split in two who appears to be made from an endless number of particles. One cannot tell if this beryl-hued life- form is falling apart or coming together. It is a thing of infinite ful x, mysterious and ancient—like the cosmos itself.
The indigo fetal figures of Poles, 2020, unite inside a giant womb that floats within an amorphous Cimmerian field. The color black was almost as present as blue in all of Rabbia’s imagery—emphatically so in Threshold, 2019, a rendering of a spectral silhouette crammed inside a narrow, claustrophobic space. Yet this ambiguous figure plays tricks on the eye, for it appears simultaneously concave adn con vex—as dense as a marble tombstone and as shallow as an open grave. “Like a nothingness after sunset, black sounds like an eternal silence, without future or hope,” Kandinsky wrote. Not so in Rabbia’s case—her blacks sing, albeit mournfully. The artist’s paintings are successful “compromise formations,” as Freud said of dreams, that Luisa Rabbia, Ecstasy, 2019, colored pencil, pastel, acrylic and oil on canvas, 102 x 47 inches (260 x 119 cm) reconcile the life and death instincts: the former integrative, ther latte disintegrative. One of the reasons her works are emotional as well as aesthetic masterpieces, not to say triumphs of the imagination, is that they make use of the modernist heritage in a singular way. She makes the dialectical terseness of abstract art wonderfully capacious and resoundingly clear.
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ArtSeen Luisa Rabbia: From
Mitosis to Rainbow By Jason Rosenfeld | December 14, 2020
Brooklyn-based artist Luisa Rabbia is showing nine new paintings in her fourth solo show at Peter Blum Gallery. The Turin-born Rabbia has worked in multiple media, but this display concentrates on canvases covered by a combination of materials: colored pencil, pastel, acrylic, and oil. They are large pictures, at up to 10 or so feet high or wide. Rabbia has always been a cerebral artist, consummate colorist, and someone committed to social and political issues. Her work is marked by a vivid tactility and fantastical abstraction. The pictures successfully channel the fine art of European Symbolism and psychological Surrealist figuration of Pavel Tchelitchew, as well as the imagery of pulp sci-fi, such as the trippy cover of the Bantam Books edition of Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric! from 1971—I well remember it from my father’s library.
The strongest and most effective paintings reprise forms and tonalities Rabbia has used previously. These are less figurally evolved and more suggestive in their use of shapes. The portrait- format Embrace and Threshold (both 2019) and Luisa Rabbia, Embrace, 2019. Colored pencil, pastel, and acrylic on canvas, 103 x 53 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Poles (2020) each feature a similar vertically Blum Gallery, NY. Photo: Jason Wyche. oriented ovoid shape with a nub at the top that reads as a head. In Embrace she has etched a rudimentary face on it, revealing a recumbent head as somnolent as that of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910). But the bulbous torso presides in these pictures, a bulk as imposing as that of Rodin’s Balzac, its sketchy outline resembling the way Milton Avery handled small-headed bodies in his late portraits. Munch often used this form, as well, to connote an inward-looking alienation and the inability to connect to others, but Rabbia has turned this hunched human form and the fin-de-siècle symbolist blue color scheme of such artists into a signifier of emotional expansiveness not abnegation. Inner secrets emerge and invite you in. Embrace has a celestial quality, with this central glowing planetary body stretched at top and bottom into an oblate shape, one ringed by a human mandorla, and resemblant of one of Agnes Pelton’s luminous, organic, animation cell-influenced orbs, here grown huge. The glowing fingerprints that
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Luisa Rabbia, I Am Rainbow, 2020. Oil on canvas, 87 x 128 inches. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Photo: Jason Wyche.
The show’s title, From Mitosis to Rainbow, implies a progression, or at least a range. Rabbia describes mitosis as “a type of cell division that results in two daughter cells, each having the same number and kind of chromosomes as the parent nucleus, and a process without which there would be no life.” The first work in the display, Nameless (2019), is landscape in format with two shadowy and recumbent bodies, partially overlapping, and enveloped in a gaseous and yellowish atmospheric bubble; their two shared feet poke out at the upper left. The oil surface, typical in Rabbia’s inventive technique, is laid over an acrylic ground. Wearing gloves, she presses into the wet oil on the canvas with her fingers, and then pulls them straight off the surface, resulting in peaks of medium without fingerprint whorls, like miniature volcanoes on a topographical map, ringed by the finger marks. On top of this she draws or shades with colored pencils to enhance the roundness of the forms and the delicate impasto. At the top are a few handprints. Comparisons to Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 at MoMA or the walls of Lascaux apply, but Rabbia’s picture is less about presence established than trying to convey the act of creation itself. If an idea of the familial doubling of mitosis is inherent in
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Nameless, then the rainbow concludes the show in the final, largest, and most recent work, I Am Rainbow (2020). It is the last painting you see as you move clockwise around the main room and is tellingly hung on the opposite side of the wall bearing Nameless. Over seven feet high and 10 feet wide, I Am Rainbow, at a distance, looks like a massive detail of a heavily mascaraed single eye from a human head in an Egyptian tomb painting. But up close, details emerge. This central, egg- like form with pinched ends lies on its long side, its elliptical shape echoed by colored rivulets of blue and orange and green that flow above and below it from right to left and respond to its contours. At the left edge, on a scrim of peach-colored matte background, these streams terminate in around 30 human feet that lie parallel to the upper and lower edges of the picture, their toes mere inches from the left edge, a communal extension of the two feet in Nameless. The planetary theme in the other pictures continues here—the pulsing eye/egg eventually came to resemble Jupiter’s Great Red Spot as I spent more time with it. I Am Rainbow is a demonstrably hopeful image, made by the artist in the midst of this trying year, a kind of coalition-building in paint. The various celestial references in pictures populated by fingerprints throughout this worthy show connote a Whitmanesque celebration of the multitudinous.
Featured in the December/January 2020/2021 Print Issue
Contributor Jason Rosenfeld Jason Rosenfeld Ph.D., is Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College. He was co-curator of the exhibitions John Everett Millais (Tate Britain, Van Gogh Museum), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and River Crossings (Olana and Cedar Grove, Hudson and Catskill, New York). He is a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.
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Luisa Rabbia has been invited to write for OPEN DIALOGUE, a space conceived as a free flow of words to develop reflections already inherent in the artist’s individual research but here more extended to the emergence of our contemporaneity.
OPEN DIALOGUE | LUISA RABBIA: "WHEN DID YOUR AMERICAN DREAM DIE?"
BY LUISA RABBIA | DECEMBER 3, 2020
“When Did Your American Dream Die?” asked an email sent by El Museo del Barrio last June in the midst of the protests in support of Black Lives Matter.
My American dream, the one that brought me to live in New York City 20 years ago, fell ill during the election of Trump and passed away a few months ago. Until then, I lived in the illusion that the fights for human rights for which America had been the spokesperson of over the years had mostly eradicated the signs of its troubling past. Many friends told me that racism still existed here, but I couldn’t believe them, because it is easy to find excuses for what you do not experience in person. And it's unsettling losing this dream, that there is true equality in America.
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY I became an American during the Obama presidency after 14 years in the United States. During that time, when I dated a black guy from the Caribbean, I didn’t experience any racism when we were together, and he protected my dream by telling me that he didn’t experience racism in the USA, either. I don't know how we managed to defend our illusion so stubbornly but, looking back, I think that we both were dreamers, and it makes sense, after all it was the ‘American dream’ that brought us here. America, for me, represented a place where, despite its troubled history, the fight for human rights was leading to a better future, to a place where EVERYONE could express their sexuality and culture, regardless of gender and race.
During the first 16 years of living here, my American friends continually tried to ‘wake me up’ to the reality of racial and social injustices, but I resisted, aided by my experience in the multiethnic environment of New York City. I insisted on justifying the cases of discrimination in the newspapers as misunderstandings. My current American boyfriend, white and raised in the South, carries the weight and legacy of this particular American sin, in his heart. His largest concern – explored and understood through personal experiences, books, movies and art -
Chorus, 2020, oil on canvas, 260 × 114 cm. is racial conflict. With experience and sensitivity, he Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, NYC. Photo Jason Wyche has shown me that racism here is systemic (only here?), but nothing has disillusioned me as abruptly as the last four years in this country. I learned to see racism through reading, movies, friendships, protests and, sadly, the daily news.
After the street demonstrations in response to the murder of George Floyd, the horrible sense of betrayal was joined by the need to continue to hope, because without hope there is no energy to change anything. Since everything is connected, we’ll be able to talk about progress only when everyone will be respected, we’ll be able to talk about freedom only when everyone will be free. Over the years we have divided into groups of color, gender, and sexual identity in order to learn how to listen to each other and to give everyone voice. It is important to listen to those who say that their life is not respected, because the fact that it does not happen to you does not mean that the problem does not exist. It just means you are privileged.
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Nameless, 2019. Colored pencils, pastels, acrylic and oil on canvas, 114 x 244 cm. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, NYC. Photo Dario Lasagni
In my work, I am interested in evoking everyone's belonging to a universe made of the past, in which everyone's actions, even the smallest ones, count in the present and determine the future. Over a surface covered by thick fingermarks I apply layers of paint in which I engrave and remove matter, in a process of addition and subtraction that I compare to life, to the passage of time. I Am Rainbow, currently shown in my solo-exhibition From Mitosis to Rainbow at Peter Blum Gallery in NYC (until January 9, 2021), was painted during the recent manifestations of division and social conflict. Rainbows, in many cultures, are symbols of hope in better times, of sexual diversity, acceptance, respect and civil rights. In some cultures, they represent ‘bridges’ between our life and the afterlife.
Luisa Rabbia, installation view of the From Mitosis to Rainbow exhibition, Peter Blum Gallery, NYC. Photo Dario Lasagni
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The title of the painting makes everyone responsible and part of the rainbow. But I Am Rainbow also reflects on the fact that we are not a stable form and as such we change and transform over time. I am not referring only to the possibility that from spirit we become matter and then return to spirit, but also to the transformations that occur in the course of our life. We can potentially be anything, we contain multitudes.
Luisa Rabbia (1970) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She studied at Liceo Artistico and at the Accademia Albertina of Fine Arts in Turin. Her first exhibition in 1991 was followed by many national and international exhibitions and scholarships which opened opportunities to experiences in Bangkok (1999, 2000), London and New York (1997). In 2000, following an invitation from the ISCP in
Luisa Rabbia NYC, she moved to the United States. This cultural change has greatly influenced her work. The attention to the inner world that characterized her early works has extended to the relationship between micro and macrocosm through the use of drawing. Lines, traces and fingerprints intertwine on the surface of her paintings, evoking the interconnection between personal and collective responsibilities. Luisa Rabbia has had solo-exhibitions at venues such as: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (2017); Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2010); Merz Foundation, Torino (2010); Querini Stampalia Foundation, Venezia (2009); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA (2008). Selected group-shows include: Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Cold Spring, NY (2020); Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018); Lismore Castle, Ireland (2016); Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2013); Museo del Novecento, Milano (2012); XV Quadriennale, Roma (2008); MAXXI Museum, Roma (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2006). Luisa Rabbia's fourth solo exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery in NYC, From Mitosis to Rainbow, opened on November 7 and will run through January 9, 2021.
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Events and Parties Editors’ Picks: 19 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, From a Piece of Venice in New York to Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Conversation Online
There's plenty of art to keep you busy this week.
Sarah Cascone, November 10, 2020 Each week, we search for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. In light of the global health crisis, we are currently highlighting events and digitally, as well as in-person exhibitions open in the New York area. See our picks from around the world below. (Times are all EST unless otherwise noted.)
Luisa Rabbia, I Am Rainbow (2020). Courtesy of Peter Blum
18. “From Mitosis to Rainbow” at Peter Blum, New York In this solo show by Italian artist Luisa Rabbia, a new body of work is made up of large -scale paintings in monochromatic blues and purples that give the impression of amorphous forms coming alive. Dealing with themes of life, birth, and spirituality, thes e works bathe the viewer in feelings of serenity and calm. Location: Peter Blum, 176 Grand Street, New York Price: Free Time: Tuesday–Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. and Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. —Neha Jambhekar
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At Magazzino, Social Distancing Devices Vibrate. So Does the Art.
A Hudson Valley oasis of Italian art debuts eight up-and-coming artists — and new wearable safety tech — upon its reopening. By Ted Loos
I’ve been cheating, and it’s likely you have been too: Six feet apart is a lot farther away than most people seem to hope it is.
I know this because at the recent reopening of Magazzino Italian Art, the museum of postwar and contemporary work here in the Hudson Valley, I wore a piece of social-distancing hardware called an EGOpro Active Tag. It was attached to a lanyard around my neck.
The tag is required for all visitors, and it’s programmed to vibrate for a few seconds every time the wearer is closer than six feet to a tag worn by another person.
Mine buzzed a lot.
Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, N.Y., has reopened. Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu founded the center in 2017 to spread awareness of postwar and contemporary Italian art.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
I misjudged my spacing quite a few times, and the incessant buzzing was annoying. But that’s the point, of course. It made me retreat, and quickly.
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“The technology makes a lot of sense to me,” said Harry Wilks of Plattekill, N.Y., one of the visitors I encountered. “It would make even more sense on the weekend, when it’s more crowded.”
My interviews weren’t exactly helping the situation. Mr. Wilks added, “Mine didn’t go off until you came up to me to talk.”
Magazzino, founded in 2017 by the collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, is the first museum in the United States to use the technology.
That Magazzino takes pandemic safety seriously is clear from the beginning of a visit there. Temperature checks are now required for all visitors, administered in a little tent outside the entrance. “Nobody’s fussing about it so far,” said Jay Nicholas, a visitor services assistant, who took mine. Masks are required, too.
Temperatures are checked before visitors enter the building.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The museum, which was closed for four months, is admitting 10 people per half-hour via advance reservation, and it assumes a 90-minute visit. It could have more visitors, according to state and county guidelines, but they decided to start cautiously.
“We wanted to find a way to have a new normal,” said Vittorio Calabrese, Magazzino’s director. “Art does not stop.”
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It was roomy and very quiet inside the high-ceilinged white galleries, arranged in a ring; the 20,000- square-foot building was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Quismondo. In galleries four and five, of eight, there are several artworks that incorporate neon, and I could distinctly hear the neon humming.
Highlights from the collection assembled by Ms. Olnick and Mr. Spanu fill most of the galleries, part of an ongoing exhibition called “Arte Povera,” dedicated to the Italian movement of the same name from the 1960s and ’70s, when pioneering Italian artists voiced their dissent about the direction of society.
Works by the movement’s greatest names are on display, including Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone, Jannis Kounellis, Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto.
The collection shows how Arte Povera encompassed many different media and styles, with a conceptual approach that frequently addresses nationality, immigration and geography; some of the practitioners worked until very recently, or are still at it.
The current selection starts in the lobby, with Mr. Pistoletto’s reinterpretation of the Italian tricolor flag, made with rags, “Stracci italiani” (2007). Inside the galleries, his cheeky “Adamo ed Eva” (1962- 87) is a portrait of a naked couple on polished stainless steel, so that the viewer can’t help but enter the picture when standing in front of it. At 87, he is still working.
View from Magazzino’s lobby, from left: Mario Merz, “Senza titolo” (1984); Giulio Paolini, “Mimesi” (1976-88); Michelangelo Pistoletto, “Stracci italiani” (2007).Credit...Alexa Hoyer, via Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art
Mr. Boetti (1940-1994) is represented by several works, including “Mappa” (1983), an embroidered work that he commissioned Afghan artisans to help him make, and “Pannello luminoso” (1966), a Color Field-style red rectangle.
Scattered throughout are works by Mr. Kounellis, who died in 2017, on the theme of travel and on the journey of memories. He gets his own dedicated gallery, too. It has a 1960 untitled painting
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Ms. Merz — the only prominent woman in the group, who died last year — is represented by several pieces including “Senza titolo (Untitled),” a 2009 small, upward-facing head on a pedestal. Made of raw clay, it almost appears to cry and retains traces of the artist’s touch around the eyes, nose and mouth.
“Senza titolo (Untitled),” by Marisa Merz, who died last year.
Now, there’s also a special show, “Homemade,” in the last gallery, featuring work made by eight Italian artists quarantined in New York during the pandemic. It began as an online and Instagram invitational, and morphed into a real exhibition.
“Magazzino wanted to support artists making new work during this time,” Mr. Calabrese said.
He added, “Some of these artists had to deal with a lot of anxiety and stress. And the common sentiment was that this kept them going. We called our regular video meetings ‘Zoom apperitvi.’”
One of the artists in “Homemade,” Alessandro Teoldi, was on site when I visited. To keep our buzzers calm, we circled each other at a remove as we chatted.
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“Homemade” features Italian artists working in isolation in the United States. Left: “Unrelenting,” a video projection, and wood-fire porcelain and ceramics by Francesco Simeti. Center: Luisa Rabbia’s “Chorus,” oil on canvas. Right: Beatrice Scaccia’s “My Hope Chest,” and video.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
During the pandemic, Alessandro Teoldi created a studio in his living room where he devised a method of creating concrete casts from paper collages. “Untitled (hug)” gets at an essential feature of the pandemic — the lack of physical intimacy.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Mr. Teoldi, who hails from Milan and lives in Brooklyn, talked about his 2020 piece “Untitled (Delta, Norwegian, COPA, Lufthansa, Thomas Cook Airlines, Hawaiian and Iberia),” which is an abstract assemblage of stretched airline blankets that looks from afar like a painting. He made it just before the pandemic hit.
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“I buy them on eBay or I steal them when I travel — or when I used to travel,” Mr. Teoldi said. I think his phrasing made us both a little wistful.
His commissioned works, a series of four reliefs called “Untitled (hug),” gets at an essential feature of the pandemic — the lack of physical intimacy. The four panels, cast in cement after starting out as a paper collage, all show people hugging.
The material, Mr. Teoldi said, helps underline “being home but not being able to move, stuck in a building made of cement.”
Having a commission to work on “was a great experience for me,” Mr. Teoldi said. “Quarantine was such a scary time.”
The other artists in “Homemade” are Andrea Mastrovito, Beatrice Scaccia, Danilo Correale, Davide Balliano, Francesco Simeti, Luisa Rabbia and Maria D. Rapicavoli.
The EGOpro Active Tag that was making my viewing of their works extra-safe is an adaptation of technology that has been around for a while, using ultra-wideband radio waves.
The tags were developed by the Italian company Advanced Microwave Engineering, which then partnered with the American company Advanced Industrial Marketing, nicely mirroring the married union of the Sardinia-born Mr. Spanu and Ms. Olnick, who is from New York City.
The technology is currently in use at the Duomo in Florence, Italy, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
An aerial view of Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, N.Y., which is hoping to expand with a pavilion for rotating exhibitions as well as a children’s program. Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
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“Proximity detection was developed to keep people away from machines, for safety,” Rob Hruskoci, the founder of Advanced Industrial Marketing in Indianapolis, told me. “Until March, no one cared about keeping people away from other people.”
Mr. Hruskoci said that two other U.S. museums had purchased the system.
José Pazos, a New York City-based artist who had come up for the day, said that the system worked well for him.
“This is by far the most responsible approach I’ve seen,” Mr. Pazos said. “This is the standard until we have a vaccine. As citizens of New York, we have to protect each other.”
Mr. Spanu and Ms. Olnick were on hand for the reopening — they live about five minutes away in Garrison — and were sitting in Magazzino’s big, open courtyard, around which the galleries circle.
I wondered about the high-tech approach and whether it was somehow out of place, given that Arte Povera — literally “impoverished art” — had commonplace materials as one of its core tenets. Ms. Olnick had a thoughtful answer.
“Arte Povera artists were expressing their times — the big transitions they all lived through, the freedom and idealism,” she said. “Their motto was, ‘Art is life.’ And this” — she gestured at a small, distanced circle of people all wearing masks and attached to buzzers — “is life now.”
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Luisa Rabbia’s Tiny Marks and Big Mysteries With her series Love-Birth-Death, Rabbia addresses some of humanity’s most enduring, universal enigmas.
February 17, 2018
By Edward M. Gómez
Luisa Rabbia, “Birth” (2017), colored pencil, acrylic, and fingerprints on canvas, 108 x 202 inches, photo by Dario Lasagni (courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery)
In these times of stridency and shrillness, how are works of art that speak with the softness of rustling chiffon in an overheated parlor ever to be heard amid a din of protest, propaganda, real news, fake news, politics-as-spectacle, or the staged, self-serving confessionals-as-entertainment that have become a mainstay of the media’s mind-numbing echo chamber?
At its best, some art can — or should — provide both a potent response and a soothing antidote to the noise, offering the refuge — and sanity — of its inherent truths while reaffirming what is most abiding, essential, soulful, or noble about the members of our big, bungling, forever searching human family (or one might just settle for something nurturing or common-sensical).
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Now, with Love-Birth-Death, a distinctive — and, for any contemporary art-maker, unusually magisterial — series of large-scale paintings, the Italian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Luisa Rabbia has addressed some of this or any era’s biggest themes, humanity’s most enduring, universal mysteries. To take on the task of representing our sense of wonder in the face of them is to try to give tangible form to the ineffable.
Luisa Rabbia, “Death” (2017), colored pencil, acrylic, and fingerprints on canvas, 108 x 202 inches, photo by Dario Lasagni (courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery)
Two of these big works, “Death” (2017) and “Birth” (2017), along with a few smaller, newer pieces, are now on view, through April 7, in Luisa Rabbia: Death & Birth, the artist’s latest solo exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery (at its new location on Grand Street, in downtown Manhattan). However, to see “Love” (2016), the third work in Rabbia’s trilogy, will require a trip to the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, a city in northern Italy that lies between Parma and Bologna, where it is on display through March 25 in Luisa Rabbia: Love. That concurrent show includes its title painting and other Rabbia works that have been acquired over the years by the Collezione Maramotti, an open-to-the-public, contemporary-art collection funded by the corporate parent of the MaxMara fashion brand.
“In making these works, I’ve felt as though I’ve been in a dialog — between myself and the surface,” Rabbia told me during a visit to her Brooklyn studio last year, as she was putting the finishing touches on “Love” before shipping it off to Italy. She was referring to her handling of her materials — gessoing and sanding a canvas before beginning to make any marks on it,
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including, notably, her own fingerprints. Her “Love-Birth-Death” paintings were all made with acrylic paint, colored pencil, and expansive agglomerations of fingerprints on canvas; each work is nine feet high and more than 16 feet wide, and each one’s pictorial space is saturated with an underlying, luminous-electric deep blue.
That powerful color shoots through each semi-abstract image to imbue it with considerable visual heft. Optically playing against that pulsating hue, Rabbia’s colored-pencil flicks and ticks, accompanied by her minuscule circular or linear strokes, swell into eddies of energized color that animate each surface as a whole. Words like “meticulous” and “painstaking” were invented to describe ambitious, skillful art-making like this; Rabbia is modest in describing her technique, noting that, to her touch, the texture of her dried-paint fingertip impressions reminds her “of fossils,” adding, “When I draw on top of them, they come alive.”
Luisa Rabbia, “Birth” (2017): detail, colored pencil, acrylic, and fingerprints on canvas, 108 x 202 inches, photo by Dario Lasagni (courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery)
Rabbia was born in 1970 near Turin, an important commercial and cultural center in northern Italy, and earned her degrees from its leading art schools. Since 2000, she has lived and worked in the United States. During her early years in New York, she recalled, she worked as a waitress in the East Village: “At that time, between taking orders, I was drawing human figures with ballpoint pens on paper napkins. I liked the way the blue ballpoint-pen ink set the mood, and the way the pens were sensitive to pressure. I thought they provided a great way to capture the feelings of my
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subjects.” Some of her early works were abstract. Their inky-blue forms resembled far-away constellations or bright moons seen against the gaseous firmaments of patchy-blue night skies.
Eventually, Rabbia switched to colored pencils. (“Ballpoint-pen ink fades over time,” she explained.) However, the lessons she learned from handling simple pens informed some of her later experiments, including her signature method of drawing with white colored pencil on top of dark-blue acrylic paint she had first applied to support surfaces in broad swaths or contoured shapes. She portrayed cloth-swaddled human bodies, dream-world topographic textures, and a spindly tree whose leafless branches and runaway root system entwine in an orgy of fecund growth.
She also made sculptural mixed-media works, often using papier mâché, onto whose blue-painted surfaces she would draw faces. For example, in “Crowd” (2011), two gatherings of tall, totem-like figures wrapped in used-clothing scraps seem to be gazing simultaneously beyond the viewer and deep into themselves, with expressions that appear more vacant than forlorn. Such works, Rabbia has noted, were inspired by her interest in the plight of migratory people.
That sense of empathy is one of her art’s abiding, motivating impulses; it is a humanistic starting point from which much of it seems to flow — a spirit that both emanates from and envelops the paintings of Love-Birth-Death. Rabbia told me, “I am particularly interested in themes that relate to everyone, that are all-inclusive and belong to human history.” Among them, she observed, are “the beginning and ending of life, the connection between lives, and the connection between past, present, and future.” For Rabbia, symbolically, and maybe even literally, the “cyclic process” to which the titles and subjects of her three big paintings refer “starts and ends in a universe of fingerprints.”
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Luisa Rabbia at work on “Birth” in her studio in Brooklyn, 2016 (photo by David Dixon)
In “Birth” and “Death,” she explained, “the countless number of fingerprints that cover the surfaces of both paintings represent layers of marks left by humanity.” “Birth,” depicts “a woman’s womb, where, potentially, life can begin.” Here, a mother’s womb becomes “the universe,” and “the center of her belly button is a fingerprint that looks like both a cosmic Big Bang and the eye of a developing fetus.” In “Death,” two human forms, at the top and the bottom of the horizontal painting, seem to lie flat while hovering on parallel planes, one above the other. About them, Rabbia said, “It is difficult to discern whether they are separating, floating, or falling.”
This kind of ambiguity is as much the stuff of these peculiar, haunting images as their inundations of fingerprints and wispy pencil marks. In “Birth,” that one fingerprint to which Rabbia referred is a tiny dot of bright, white paint that, for all its smallness, anchors an entire cosmos. It is nestled in a womb-chamber filled with currents of blue that branch deeply into the enclosed space. That white speck and the immense, veiny network of energy streams surrounding it offer a vision of the immanent — a new life — and the humbling reminder that the fullness, complexity, and unpredictable trajectory of any living thing begin with a mere cluster of cells.
The larger-than-life-size cadaver that lies flat on its back at the top of the canvas in “Death” is a mummy-like form quietly humming from the charge of a still-active spirit-energy system, whose
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veiny tributaries form a cascade of watery tendrils. Their jelly-fish transparency is punctuated with bright-orange fingerprints that stand out like flower petals caught in the current of a slow-moving stream.
Luisa Rabbia, “Lingam Yoni (1)” (2017), acrylic and colored pencil on paper, mounted on canvas, 74 x 48 inches, photo by
Dario Lasagni (courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery)
Similarly, three smaller paintings in the Peter Blum show, all of which share the title “Lingam Yoni” (all were made with acrylic and colored pencil on canvas in 2017) are also meticulously crafted. Depicting stelae-like forms, each of which bears a discernible belly button, these images echo the life-cycle theme of their larger mates. Each one alludes to a lingam and to a yoni, which are, respectively, in Hindu art, stylized representations of the omnipotent, masculine deity Shiva and of Shakti, a goddess embodying divine feminine creative power.
Symbolically, some forms of a lingamand a yoni may refer erotically to male and female sex organs. Recognizing such references, Rabbia said of these paintings, “I see them as portraits in which the masculine and the feminine merge.” Each one’s belly button, she said, might be that “of a mother or perhaps of a newborn, defining the space of a womb.” The arch-shaped tops of her
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painted forms, she explained, “define the shape of each lingam-yoni,” noting that they represent a human scale, “inviting an entrance or an exit, and again referencing birth and death.”
In their forays into the mystic, Rabbia’s paintings share something with works as diverse as those of William Blake (1757-1927), the French Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840-1916), and even Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) — not so much for that definitive Swiss Symbolist’s more didactic images, but rather for some of his on-the-border-of-abstraction, late-career landscapes, in which vistas of lakes and mountains become strips of reverberating, highly charged color.
As for other modernists and contemporaries, Rabbia’s works find kindred spirits among some of the drawings of Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith. Curiously, in ways both thematic and technical, they also relate to those of the self-taught artists Hiroyuki Doi and Mehrdad Rashidi. Doi, who is Japanese, creates voluminous abstract compositions with multitudes of tiny circles, each of which, he says, represents a single human soul. The Iranian-born Rashidi, who lives in Germany, uses ballpoint pens on found scraps of paper to draw clusters of human faces and bodies that emerge organically out of each other.
Luisa Rabbia, “Love” (2016), colored pencil, acrylic, and fingerprints on canvas, 108 x 202 inches, Collezione Maramotti; photo by Dario Lasagni (courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery)
Speaking of her relationship with her pictures during the course of creating them, slowly, over extended periods of time, Rabbia remarked, “A vision can find its way out when you work in
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solitude.” So, too, may the messages and meanings of her paintings, works that are seemingly designed for contemplation, gradually emerge for those who take the time to dive into these pictures’ reservoirs of psychic energy, penetrating their pregnant, primordial hush.
Rabbia’s art is one of subtlety and resonance, her subjects as fleeting as they are timeless. If her raw materials appear to be paint and color, don’t be fooled: they are actually the enduring, eternal mysteries that are the companions of any human soul.
Luisa Rabbia: Death & Birth at continues at Peter Blum Gallery (176 Grand Street, Little Italy, Manhattan) through April 7. Luisa Rabbia: Love runs through March 25 at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy (appointments available online).
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February 6, 2018
Featured item from THE LIST: Luisa Rabbia, opening Friday at Peter Blum by David Cohen
At once intimate and sumptuous, Zen and nerdy, aloof and intricate, Luisa Rabbia “Death&Birth” cycle is a monument to nuttiness—an existential comment, in itself, perhaps, upon the sublime absurdity of existence. A pair of gargantuan murals represents the moments of entry and departure, complemented by three of her LingamYoni series (pictured) at a relatively modest height of six feet, everything worked in a bewilderingly painstaking technique of layered colored pencil strokes building up to the eerie glow of outer-space or the inner recesses of the body. The author/executor of these visual marvels is at once a god of sorts and a mere cell in her own creation.
See THE LIST for details
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NYC Gallery Scene – Highlights Through February 11, 2018 February 6, 2018 by Genevieve Kotz EXHIBITIONS, GALLERIES, Happening Now, NEW YORK CITY
DOWNTOWN
Peter Blum Gallery: “Luisa Rabbia: Death&Birth”
February 9 through April 7, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, February 9, from 6 to 8 p.m.
In her third solo show with Peter Blum Gallery, Luisa Rabbia will present “Death&Birth,” featuring new works.
The “Death&Birth” exhibition is the culmination of a trilogy, with “Love” currently on view in Italy. Rabbia’s works at Peter Blum explore birth and death as a process of transformation rather than as an experience with a distinct beginning and end. The exhibition includes three smaller paintings of the artist’s “LingamYoni” series, referring to the lingam and yoni shapes in Hindu culture.
Rabbia’s work is intricately layered to a create a glowing palette of yellow, red and violet hues on a deep field of blue acrylic, with countless fingerprints covering the surface of each painting alluding to the individuality of human nature and the marks left by humans on history. Rooted in the dialectic between inner and outer space, her work operates on a micro and macro level, making reference to the touch and form of the human body.
Peter Blum Gallery is located at 176 Grand St, New York, NY 10013. www.peterblumgallery.com.
Click here for exhibition details.
"Death" by Luisa Rabbia, 2017. Colored pencil, acrylic and fingerprints on canvas, 108 x 202 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
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Reggio Emilia, Italy Reviews
Luisa Rabbia COLLEZIONE MARAMOTTI By Ida Panicelli January 2018
The color blue has been important to Luisa Rabbia’s artistic investigations since the 1990s. This show of ten works made between 2009 and 2017 adds new nuances and tonalities: violet, maroon, red. Drawing in pencil on acrylic paint on paper or canvas, she weaves an intricate web of signs and achieves pictorial plenitude in the combination/opposition of a flat, frequently blue background and the vertiginous stratification of pencil marks. In these works, inner and outer landscapes coexist, demanding a variable perspective from viewers. At close range, one can perceive traces of the artist’s hand, in spirals of entangled colors and imprints of the artist’s fingertips, yet at the same time these works leave no doubt that Rabbia’s vision is expansive, conceiving and controlling vast spaces.
Love, 2016, from which the show takes its title, is the first painting in a trilogy that also includes Birth and Death, both 2017; all are the same size, nine feet by sixteen feet ten inches. (The latter two works will be exhibited for the first time at the Peter Blum Gallery in New York in February 2018.) In Love, two gigantic genderless figures are joined at their centers and hold hands, floating weightlessly over a blue space that might be an ocean, a cosmos, or an amniotic environment. The intimate landscape formed by the tantric union of two bodies extends into the outer one, consolidated through a vein- or rootlike structure that seems to fuse organic, human, and celestial geographies. Likewise, in NorthEastSouthWest, 2014, microcosm and macrocosm interweave in a nebulous primordial state. Four juxtaposed panels compose an image of a vital organ, perhaps a brain or a kind of heart; expanding from the center, the structure reaches toward infinity with tubular tentacles that continue beyond the frame in the four cardinal directions.
The vast and spectacular site-specific blue wall painting Another Country, 2017, is inspired by James Baldwin’s book of the same title. Baldwin’s phrase conjures the possibility of a place beyond race and gender. On the mural’s upper portion, an indistinct human multitude moves from right to left against a white background, with myriad blue heads created from the artist’s fingerprints. Present in Rabbia’s work since 2012, the fingerprint functions as a mark of individuality and alludes to the trace that every human being leaves over the course of a lifetime, regardless of gender or race. In the lower portion of the mural, deep roots drawn in white pastel stretch down into the tangled depths of history, from which we all have emerged. There is a longing for freedom in these human masses in motion, and if the roots seem to stifle free movement, they also provide nourishment, generation after generation.
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Luisa Rabbia, Love(detail), 2016, colored pencil and acrylic on canvas, 9' × 16' 10".
Similarly, in I Want to Be There, Too, 2015, a thronging crowd formed by fingerprints in blue acrylic gathers on the banks of an impetuous, apocalyptic red river, apparently seeking to traverse it. One inevitably thinks of refugees crossing the Mediterranean. Moving once again from personal and inner experiences to the collective and social, Rabbia’s associations in this dramatic painting speak of empathy and the possibility of dialogue and encounter. Despite the demarcation line, the river’s currents allow the circulation of shared feelings, expectations, and fears— and assimilate individuals and crowds into the grand stream of history. —Ida Panicelli Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
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Silence and noise. Luisa Rabbia and Emma Hart in Reggio Emilia By Anna Vittoria Zuliani - December 14th 2017
Love by Luisa Rabbia (born in Pinerolo in 1970) is a collection of introspective images, which through the gaze speak to the soul. It is an exhibition that attracts the attention of the spectator with works on paper and canvas, a site-specific mural and an artist's book. The Maramotti Collection presents a retrospective of ten years of research through which the artist's growth is tangible. From The Within Out (2009) portrays sleeping migrants in a figurative work that describes sleep as a moment of escape and not a dream. Since 2011 the space of the canvas has been defined by thin and vivid marks, similar to red and blue blood vessels. I Want To Be There, Too, instead, brings the mind back to the colors of the Scream by Munch; a crowd of fingerprints portraits anonymous individuals who from one side of the planet to the other merge with the landscape, moving and exchanging energy through an infinite impulse. Here, a pure, inner dimension, emerges as peace and as torment, in other words life. The artist is intimately seeking to find a connection between an inner journey and a physical one, where humans travel crossing lands and borders. Love, part of the Love-Birth- Death trilogy, is the portrait of two bodies firmly involved in an embrace. In the catalogue of the exhibition, Mario Diacono compares these two bodies, crossed by a single spine of arteries and veins, to a Sephirotic Tree which expands in the surrounding void. The image is pure power, it is electricity, it brings into the room the breath of the bodies, floating in the cosmic silence. Luisa Rabbia's nuanced and strong works do not attack, they enter into the mind of the viewer as nerve endings, subtle and deep as the strokes on the artist's canvases.
Luisa Rabbia, I Want To Be There, Too, 2015 (detail). Courtesy and © Luisa Rabbia. Photo Dario Lasagni
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Drawing the painting By Silvia Bottani December 8, 2017
"I like looking at roots even when I don’t see their origin." Luisa Rabbia
There are works that arrive with a bang, loudly announcing their presence as if demanding to be looked at. There are others, however, that breathe in the space and patiently await the arrival of their observer, cultivating a secret life that happens before and after meeting the spectator. Luisa Rabbia's works belong to the latter: they call for a more gentle-mannered approach, reaching out to those who decide to connect with them and paving the way to a world of silent vastness.
While originally from Pinerolo, Luisa Rabbia has been living and working in New York for many years, which makes her new exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti a rare opportunity to closely observe her work. Love is a small yet fully-fleshed-out retrospective, featuring canvases, drawings and a large mural from different stages of the artist’s career. The earliest works on display are from 2009, blue shapes on white backgrounds depicting primordial organic beings and unidentified biomorphismes. These can be considered “gateway pieces”: works fundamental to understanding the transition between Rabbia’s earlier works and her most recent pieces. Driven by an obvious interest in surface, these later works are almost "epidermal" in nature; the need for controlled figuration is duly overcome, expanding the space for representation and offering a sort of pictorial meditation in which signs and colors become closely interdependent.
Luisa Rabbia, Another Country 2017, wax pastel, acrylic 2,56 x 17,28 mt, site specific for Collezione Maramotti Ph. Dario Lasagni.
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While she did experiment with varied artistic languages ranging from video to sculpture, Luisa Rabbia's preferred medium is drawing, with its scenic strength and direct relationship to gesture. Although drawing is conventionally identified as a conceptual discipline par excellence, in Rabbia’s work it is also a venue for tracing the body, favored for its expressive strength and rough specificity. It was precisely these virtues that made drawing the artist’s choice of primary language during her first experiences in the United States, where the situation called for a lighter medium, allowing for a wide range of expression without requiring a large space for production. Drawing, after all, asks for little more than a blue pen and a sheet of paper to create entire worlds.
In the very gestures of her drawings we find the core of Rabbia’s artistic practice, deeply rooted in the dialectic between inner and outer space. As put by the artist herself: "Drawing has always been my medium. I've always preferred the trace to the brush stroke”. However, while this relationship with the trace is evident in all the works on display, the graphic act here is not confined to the mark of the pencil; rather, it is activated, irradiating its energy towards painting. The tip of the pencil touching the surface of the paper and the flow of their interactions are a priori aspects of several of her creative manifestations. The movement towards the other, which is the foundation of Rabbia’s work, is an energy that reconnects her to the legacy of Arte Povera. An inner/outer exchange involving both the phenomenological and symbolic dimensions of the work’s space and the relationships between the artist and the world in an attempt to find a meeting point between the intimacy of the experience of self and the unknowable that resides in the other, culminating in the form of a lay communion with existence. The relationship between the empirical, tangible space of the canvas and the inner space of the representation also draws from the lessons of Agnes Martin, an artist beloved by Rabbia and whose presence can be keenly felt among her canvases. These two artists do not have what one could describe as a relationship of filiation or citation; it is rather one of neighboring worlds that resonate with each other, united by a will to cut their work to the bone in order to bring forth deep, universal and occasionally scandalous truths.
Luisa Rabbia, Love, Exhibition view at Collezione Maramotti, 2017 Ph. Dario Lasagni
The 2009 works mark an approach to form with a clearly perceivable generative movement: while shapes are still closed, there is a clear sense of where the exploration of those dense subjects tends to
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Today, Luisa Rabbia’s drawings have changed, shifting direction towards painting, and given life to works that tend to abstraction and draw on a deep palette of myriad purples, blues, reds and browns; colors that vibrate in low frequencies and conjure the evocative power of Abstract Expressionism. A color transcendent and cleansed of the constraints of form, emerging from the canvas with what is almost a movement of self-determination: “Somehow I paint, but I paint using the traces of my body, my hands, and then the colors arrive with colored pencils. Before I begin to draw, all we have is a big blue surface”.
In Rabbia’s work, however, there is no lyrical dimension or drama. What is manifested is a camouflaged figuration, a network of traces that simultaneously suggest geographic maps, X-rays, cells, shrubs, venous webs, cartography, sky maps (Microcosmo, 2014). Her canvases offer spectators an opportunity for imaginative reading, where one can perceive wounds and karstic openings, rivers and ravines, visions ambiguously reminiscent of both geographical and medical atlases (Pathway, 2014, Untitled, 2013). Everything seems to be in dialogue: sex or a river, bacteria and minerals, roots, human and animal skin; rhizomes, mushrooms, lungs. Each element contributes to a network of traces that, while seemingly random, in fact outline a plot crisscrossed by automatic writings of distant surrealist origin. The barrier between what is inside and what is outside vanishes; everything is addressed as a way to overcome the physical body, seen here as a limit to the external world. Here is profound nakedness, the antithesis of what philosopher Leonardo Caffo calls "a humanity built on the borders"(1), an exercise in revelation carried out through figuration that has the boldness not to resemble anything the contemporary market offers in the way of discourse about the present.
All the sons of Adam form one body They are of the same essence. When time afflicts with pain A part of the body Other parts suffer. If you do not feel the thought of others you do not deserve to be called man. Sa'di of Shiraz
This sort of ‘universal map of existence’ removes man from the center of the universe, instead inserting it into a complex system where everything exists in relation to other things but without exercising domain or hierarchy thereon. The artist is part of this dance, too. Unveiled, she offers the spectator the spoliation of her masks and the ritualistic exposure of her own life: "I am interested in finding the connections between an interior landscape, based on personal experience, and a collective landscape where you meet the Other, which is also a physical landscape - it is the environment." If the skin is a landscape and blue is an ideal color that represents a "universal breed", the distinguishing marks of I Want to Be There, Too(2015) are in the human multitude, the painful masses of migrants, but also in the testimony of every single individuality, the cellular unit. Millennia of human and environmental evolution, of stories told that add to other stories, of chemical reactions, causes and consequences that bind existence from the cosmos’ mysterious origins to the instant that has just passed. One after the other, the events attest to a shared experience that opens up to real possibilities of empathy among individuals and towards the world. All of us are those distinguishing marks, beings waiting under a river of bloodlines dating back to the beginning of time and art to Munch and forward, into tomorrow. Because, as we now know, time does not run smoothly, and art is proof of it.
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Luisa Rabbia, Love, Exhibition view at Collezione Maramotti, 2017 Ph. Dario Lasagni.
"I can never find in other colors that depth, that mystery that blue gathers. That silence."
A blue veil pervades the works, giving the images a form of rarefaction, subtracting corporeality from the figures. In the site-specific mural Another Country (2017), blue throbs beneath the thin white pastel texture that runs along the entire surface, emerging almost like frottage. Granted the time to observe the work in silence for a long time, one happens to resonate with it. If it had a sound, it would be the continuous chord of an Indian shruti box, a harmonium-type instrument that accompanies mantra songs. It is not a question of summoning an explicit spiritual scenario, but rather that of catching that breath - an Aleph, perhaps - the respiration perceived in the canvases, allowed to rise by the vibration of color. That breath is perceived through the organs of NorthEastSouthWest (2014) and Everyone (2013), the "celestial bodies" embedded in Love's (2016) intercourse that Mario Diacono, in the catalogue’s critique, interprets in the light of Jewish mysticism by highlighting an underlying bond with Sephiroth, the Tree of Life, turned upside down, roots stretching into the air.
In a historical horizon marked by shattering, the experience brought about by Luisa Rabbia's work is a form of peripheral vision. Not one center but a multitude of centers; not one identity, but all of them. The re-appropriation of a deep sense of kinship, not limited to the small size of a family clan but rather extended to the understanding of every part of the reality in which we are immersed, is a powerful social hypothesis for our present, a thesis that openly challenges the fears that compete to define the spirit of our time. Having definitively overcome the boundaries of form imposed by sculpture (the protagonist of the first season of the artist's work), Rabbia has today arrived - thanks to drawing - on the shores of a new figurative territory eager to be fully explored. A land of endless spaces, a continent whose geographic coordinates reside in the heart of man.
1 - Fragile umanità. Il postumano contemporaneo, di Leonardo Caffo, Einaudi, 2017.
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Love, an exhibition by Luisa Rabbia at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia
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Return to Italy. Interview with Luisa Rabbia
By Domenico Russo - October 23, 2017
Luisa Rabbia is available for a chat during a preview on the occasion of her return to the Belpaese. She is the author of the exhibition Love at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. Which celebrates ten years of its exhibition activity.
How did the splitting of Love from the Love-Birth-Death project come about? Looking into my works collected by Maramotti over the years I realize that they have preferred pieces that marked a turning point in my practice: for example, in this exhibition we see my first work on canvas, my first mural and Love, which is the first piece of a trilogy on which I worked in the last year. It is an ambitious project, each canvas measures 274 × 513 cm and is made of colored pencils on acrylic on canvas.
How did you conceive this exhibition? Acquisitions have taken place over the years and naturally we had no way of knowing that we would arrive at this point. When the possibility to exhibit all the works together was raised, we realized that we had the opportunity to show what happened in my research between my solo-show at the Fondazione Merz in Turin in 2009 and today. This small retrospective is comprised of highlights from my work that the Collezione Maramotti has sensibly captured, and gives the opportunity to show how my work has developed since I moved to the United States in 2000.
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Luisa Rabbia. Photo Dario Lasagni, 2017
There are works in the show from 2009 to 2017. What happened in these years? If we look at the first work from 2009 we see that it is still figurative and the subjects are sleeping migrants. Sleep, as a moment of evasion from the surrounding, rather than as a space for dreams, has been central in my research for many years from 1997 to 2010, above all through the representation of homeless people isolated from the world around them. Since 2011, the skin of my portraits have begun to extend and merge into the environment, its veins marking paths within landscapes that sometimes conjure internal maps or infinite geographies. In these works, faces have been replaced by fingerprints which capture the uniqueness of the individual without revealing sexual gender or ethnicity.
What are the figures that inhabit the current imaginary? In this moment I am interested in tracing connections between a journey within the body, and therefore the personal experience, and the outward and therefore collective landscape.
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Fingerprints and pencil marks, intertwined in a complex arterial structure of membranes and tissues under the skin, remind of an acute perception of one's own body. Such a feeling can be raised in a larger apparatus of natural origin that includes everyone. In this long journey, which you have undertaken within the individual, what are you looking for and what interests you in particular? I am interested in the encounter with the other, the empathy and the implicit journey to bridge distances, through a language that considers separation as much as fusion, and that belongs to the individual as much as to the collective. The other, in my work, is both human being and natural environment. The journey starts under the skin but extends to distant lands.
Luisa Rabbia, I Want To Be There, Too, 2015 (detail). Courtesy and © Luisa Rabbia. Photo Dario Lasagni
The theme of migration is present in your work not from a political point of view, but more from a socially and psychologically one. How did you come to work on this topic? In the show there are several paintings that reflect on migration, on carrying our own personal and cultural experience that inevitably will blend with what is not yet known and awaits us on the other side. I'm
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY interested in dealing with contemporary themes that have distant roots in human history, reflect on stories that repeat themselves and on which each of us could be the protagonist. I prefer universal subjects so that the work changes and lives under the eyes of the experience of the observer.
This topic is related to your experience: you left and you faced the stages of an integration. Of course, my experience helped me to develop a sensitivity and a language, but as you can see, I never talk about my personal story. The themes I face belong to humanity and its relationships, to the passage of time and to the accumulation of traces ... Like those of the fingerprints and pencils on the surface of my canvases. Another Country is the mural you are working on in the Collezione Maramotti. This is the first time you have done a site-specific work on a wall. Can you tell me more about it? Another Country is the title of a book by James Baldwin that I believe refers to the desire to live in a utopian place where sexual and ethnic differences could be redefined or perhaps not defined at all. Another Country also refers to the change of our inner map after a long journey. But Another Country could also be those around us.
- Domenico Russo
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A Weed is a Plant Out of Place LISMORE CASTLE ARTS Lismore Castle, April 3–September 30
View of “A Weed is a Plant Out of Place,” 2016
The curator of this group exhibition, Allegra Pesenti, is a specialist in drawing. This is readily apparent with the seventeen artists she’s selected, who offer up a range of works in varying degrees of subtlety and delicacy. Michael Landy’s series of weed etchings, “Nourishment,” 2002, hanging in a line across an entire wall, are the exhibition’s linchpin. Landy’s renderings of these plants are a testament to the perseverance of the seemingly fragile, highlighting unexpected beauty in the most inhospitable of spots. Adrian Paci’s video The Guardians, 2015, echoes Landy’s sentiments with its depiction of children cleaning an Albanian graveyard. In about six minutes, Paci takes us through life and death via creeping vines that slowly defeat the seeming invincibility of stones. Equally beguiling is Mat Collishaw’s Whispering Weeds, 2011, an animated homage to Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf, 1503; and Dorothy Cross’s Foxglove, 2015, a group of eerie bronze bells made from casts of fingertips. Latifa Echakhch’s humorous “Tumbleweeds,” 2012, are scattered around the gallery. They’re found objects rather than crafted works, which you can purchase by mail order. And Luisa Rabbia’s Passage, 2008–14, makes an emphatic point about migration and the need to put down roots. Her zigzag drawing/frieze depicts what appear to be small grasses growing on a veiny blue earth. On closer inspection, however, what’s revealed is an endless procession of humanity—diasporic masses spreading throughout the globe, seeking out new habitats that might support life and different kinds of cultures. — Gemma Tipton
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Luisa Rabbia investigates human psyche at Midtown gallery show
December 17, 2014 Alison Martin, writer
Luisa Rabbia, NorthEastSouthWest, 2014
The Peter Blum Gallery in midtown is presenting a collection of new works by Luisa Rabbia for an exhibition titled Drawing. For this show, Rabbia presents several drawings, paintings, sculptures, and other mixed media works where she delves into the depth of the human soul and investigates how individuals relate to others and how they respond to their surrounding environment.
The color blue appears throughout many of Rabbia’s works, as it symbolizes the color of blood in the veins of the human vascular system. For instance, a series of works titled Worlds 1 and Worlds 2 respectively features a deep blue background and white pencil drawings of two heads on both halves of the image. Worlds 1 depicts the heads of two figures, one of them whose head is upside down on top, and directly on the flip side,
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY on the bottom is another figure’s head. Both figures have what appears to be their hair tied in a bun that connects them. Similarly, Worlds 2 also features a flipside image of two figures connected by what appears to be their hair against a deep blue background.
Rabbia also presents pieces where she draws outlines of faces on rocks that she’s found. One sculpture titled Sunrise features a face lying on its side, and another face with the eyes closed, gently kissing the cheek of the face lying on its side. A similar, untitled sculpture features a figure sleeping, the face, a very light blue, with the hand over the mouth.
A diptych titled Sottopelle and another untitled piece feature distorted faces connected by intertwining roots. The facial skin symbolizes exaggerated psychological states. Similarly, a four-panel drawing titled NorthEastSouthWest features a group of roots floating in a violet-colored oval shape. At Peter Blum Gallery, 20 W. 57th St. through Feb. 7. The gallery is open Tues. – Fri. from 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., and Sat. from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
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Luisa Rabbia, “Drawing”
December 29, 2014
By her own admission, this Italian artist who lives and works in Brooklyn is heavily influenced by the legacy of late-’60s Arte Povera, but her paintings and sculptures also seem shadowed by examples of 1980s Italian Neo-Expressionists like Francesco Clemente. Her palette, both emotionally and colorwise, is dominated by crepuscular shades of blue, while fine rootlike patterns of lines suggesting veins and capillaries are a frequent motif, along with images of faces and heads pictured in repose. The combination creates a vibe that's both dreamful and dolorous.
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
OCTOBER 2012
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected]
PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected]
PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected]