At Villa delle Rose the first Italian solo exhibition of Catherine Biocca

Villa delle Rose in Bologna hosts the exhibition You’re hired!, the first Italian solo show of Italian-German artist Catherine Biocca (Rome, 1984), which can be visited until May 26, 2019.

The emerging artist trained between Germany and the Netherlands, who has participated in numerous international group shows and held many solo exhibitions, bases her production on audio-visual, graphic-pictorial and sculptural elements, creating installations consisting of sounds, animations, graphic curtains and wall works. He uses awide variety of techniques and materials: from drawings on waxed canvas to computer animations, from audio-visual installations to animated sculptures. He is often inspired by the imagery of cartoons and comic books, which become the protagonists of dystopian situations, in which aspects of irony, absurdity and violence are emphasized. He also uses a simple linguistic register and a direct communicative impact, thanks to animations and images downloaded directly from the net.

His creations address social, political and economic issues, such as the overproduction of images in the media sphere and in contemporary art; the difficult definition of an identity and the negotiation of a balance between competition and collaboration with others; and the search for an eschatological catharsis from a physical and psychological state of exhaustion or threat.

The solo exhibition in the Villa delle Rose runs throughout the ground floor rooms, and the artist has decided on this occasion to introduce performative interventions that can engage visitors.

The two series of interventions Ruins I-V and Busti Rosa I-III intend to reflect on the symbolic value of ruins and fragments layered in an archaeology of the everyday: the artist reworks images of sculptural and architectural details eroded and damaged by time to construct new identities.
The exhibition takes its name from the title of the installation of the same name: You’re hired! Two mannequins covered in anti-insect headgear face each other inside a large mosquito net and establish an impossible dialogue. The character who expresses his feelings,corresponds to a formal interlocutor who ignores his requests and emotions. A condition created by the difficult identity definition of these two figures, objects thatpresent human features, but that, due to their mere sculptural function, lose suchvalence.
The Steli I-III series combines pictorial elements with stone sculptures inspired by funerary stelae from Etruscan times, evoking the period when the villa was used as a Red Cross hospital facility during the years of World War II. The memory of the suffering of the hospitalized guests clashes with the feeling of sarcasm embodied by a cartoonish character painted on the wall, in the act of observing these cult elements, displaying his own nudity through the typical exhibitionist gesture of the raincoat. Noticeable in this series is the sense of subtle pleasure derived from the failures of others, referred to in German as Schadenfreude.

In the intervention Exclusive Cocktail, the artist creates an immersive setting, a trompe-l’oeil, through the projection of the tree-lined avenue of the Villa delle Rose park on which a giant prehistoric animal strolls undisturbed. To finish, the wall intervention Broken Sky simulates the opening of a gash that opens the view to a sky, causing an unexpected discontinuity in the perception of the boundaries of the museum container.

The retrospective is curated by Giulia Pezzoli.

For info: www.mambo-bologna.org/villadellerose

Hours: Saturday and Sunday from 2 to 7 p.m.

Free admission

At Villa delle Rose the first Italian solo exhibition of Catherine Biocca

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