Amin Gulgee stars in Rome with solo exhibition 7.7

Pakistani artist and performer Amin Gulgee arrives at the Mattatoio in Rome, July 26 to August 26, 2018, with the exhibition “7.7” curated by Paolo De Grandis and Claudio Crescentini and co-curated by Carlotta Scarpa. Amin Gulgee is an innovator of tradition, his medium is metal and he draws inspiration from the rich and varied artistic and spiritual history of his native Pakistan. His expressive journey, linked to Hindu mythology, Buddhist figures of thought and Islamic calligraphy, has developed over the years through sculpture and installations.

The event includes the presentation of two large installations that develop by contrast through fullness and emptiness, light and shadow to the synthesis of a video installation. Set up in the spaces of La Pelanda, the two installations symbolize the artist’s expressive research that started from a verse in the Quran that states that God “taught man what he did not know” (Quran, 96:5). This, in essence is the artist’s leitmotif that recurs from readable at first and then progressively deconstructed and finally fragmented and fractionated.

This calligraphic text appears and returns for some time now as a persistent, almost obsessive concern in the artist’s works, manifesting itself in various sculptural compositions sometimes in the form of geometric constructions, signs that ideally feed on the geometry of fractals. The fragment is the image of the whole. With his artistic insight, Amin Gulgee demonstrates what deep connection exists between mathematics, art, spirit and nature, and the common thread, once again, is beauty.
Hovering between “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” beauty, the letters decomposed and freed from semantics take on a symbolic meaning that as such has on the one hand a character of aesthetic-sensible immediacy and on the other moves toward a relationship with the other that refuses domination and possession, thus offering the possibility of establishing a concrete spiritual dialogue with the world. In recherche of the innermost meaning, the visitor will thus be able to unravel the thread of the ball of yarn in this labyrinthine journey.
Ultimately, all of Amin Gulgee’s work is always and everywhere rhythmic. The ever-changing signs and everted letters are true visible music, and the overall architecture thus finds a new form. Form in perpetual becoming, sign to be decoded in a kind of timelessness to which counterpoint is the space that urges reflection and itself becomes a cognitive tool, a table where past and present can be measured.

To create the two works, Gulgee chose copper, which together with charcoal and the projection of an algorithm becomes the testimony of a symbolic path of change, personal and universal reflection together, a path marked in the recovery of tradition toward the future.

The exhibition is promoted by Roma Capitale - Assessorato alla Crescita Culturale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, organized in collaboration with PDG Arte Communications and theEmbassy of the Republic of Pakistan in Italy.
Admission is free.

Image: Amin Gulgee, Coal Carpet

Amin Gulgee stars in Rome with solo exhibition 7.7

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