Counting the winters: in Ortisei the new solo exhibition of Aron Demetz

The Doris Ghetta Gallery welcomes Aron Demetz’s new solo exhibition, entitled Nur die Winter zählend / Counting Winters , from July 6 to September 7 at its Ortisei (Bolzano) location. Following the success of his last exhibition Intermezzo, Demetz returns with a new selection of recent works that highlight the importance of matter. The artist, born in 1972 in Sterzing, is guided by the inherent characteristics of redwood, exploring its limits and bringing out unique stories and details. These new works reflect the metaphor of “winters,” periods of endurance and growth for trees.

Demetz’s sculptures chronicle the lives of redwoods, majestic trees from a late 19th-century plantation in South Tyrol. Through the subtraction of material, the artist reveals the hidden beauty in the trees’ structure, highlighting how fragile moments contribute to the formation of these natural giants. Thin slats, symbols of precarious balance, evoke the resilience hidden in vulnerability, showing how these structures can support up to fifty meters in height. Demetz’s works explore the tension between permanence and transience, embodying strength in fragility. The sculptures play with visual perception, transforming the layered construction into an alchemical balance between nature and destruction, influenced as much by man as by time. The works dialogue with humanity’s ongoing quest for technological advancements, represented through the figure of cyborgs and robots, hybrid beings that challenge the boundaries between “organism and machine” as described by Donna Haraway in “The Cyborg Manifesto.”

The sculptures, with their colorful additions, appear to be produced by machines such as 3D printers. However, looking at them closely, the mastery of the sculptor’s hand and the singularities of the wood emerge. The works in the gallery’s two main rooms narrate past and future time, while the video room hosts a reflection on present time. An area adjacent to the exhibition offers live streaming from the artist’s studio, allowing visitors to observe Demetz’s creative process in real time.

Counting the winters: in Ortisei the new solo exhibition of Aron Demetz

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