Making Time: at Poggiali in Florence, the works of Slater Bradley, Park Chan-kyong and Grazia Toderi

Galleria Poggiali in Florence presents the exhibition Making Time curated by Lorenzo Bruni with works by Slater Bradley(San Francisco, 1975), Park Chan-kyong(Seoul, 1965) and Grazia Toderi(Padua, 1963).
The project proposes three autonomous exhibitions of world-renowned artists, each made up of and characterized by heterogeneous “media” that, in an absolute premiere, presents to the European public the latest productions together with historical works usually not usable in Italian museums, developed in the three different environments of the Florentine gallery and specifically designed for it.

Photographs, videos, collages, video installations, drawings and pictorial interventions belonging to different cycles, together with new productions, aim to create an unexpected dialogue aimed at illuminating/focusing the center of the researches of these three internationally renowned artists in relation to the current digital, post-ideological and global world.

Slater Bradley, Park Chan-kyong, and Grazia Toderi are artists from different cultural backgrounds (the United States, South Korea, and Italy, respectively), but all three began their journey by adopting moving images, not so much to celebrate the novelty of the medium of video art, but to reflect on narrative, audience, and artwork at a time when the Internet and the globalization of markets were parceling out traditional centers of power and altering the way facts and the expectations that came with them were told. Their psudo-labyrinthian narratives aim to bring out the need for empathic and physical fruition as opposed to the linear sequence of cause and effect actions with which to be able to re-negotiate the boundary between illusion and reality, between opinions and facts in a society where the truth of information appears illusorily within everyone’s reach.

These are three accomplished artists: Grazia Toderi is a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, and Park Chang-kyong, along with Slater Bradley himself, is the youngest artist to have had a solo show at The Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The itinerary starts with Slater Bradley’s work, which, in addition to the 2013 video Sequoia, features two works on canvas from 2011 and the 2018 work Parthenon Solar Shield, an offshoot of the series shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale, all together with his new 2018 blue monochromes, as well as Blue David Shield, about Michelangelo’sDavid. The exhibition continues with works by Park Chan-kyong, who is exhibiting for his first time in Europe the light-boxes and related video Child Soldier, consisting of photographs that examine the social and political complex of South Korea’s history, folk tradition and shamanism and, at the same time, the impact of the Korean war and the resulting South-North divide.

Grazia Toderi, in the project room on Via Benedetta, offers in addition to the new video installation Red Map, an unprecedented focus on 1997: her historical drawings on paper along with the famous Centro, cibachrome on plexiglass. In the gallery spaces, on the other hand, unravels the imaginary cartography Atlas Red: 8 photographs, three of them large, created thinking about the sedimentation of our earth and the orbits of the planets, but also the orbits of our eyes, the red in fact is made starting from the color of the artificial lights of our cities at night. He also presents Disappearing Map, three unpublished works made on 5-6 sheets of tracing paper each, stacked on top of each other. “The first assessment that emerges,” writes curator Lorenzo Bruni, “is that they have not adopted video to cut bridges with art history, but rather to revitalize it and rethink it from another point of view. The second is related to the fact that for them the suspension/expansion of the narrative is only the means to give concreteness to the concept of time and allow a dialogue between the objective and the personal, between history and vision, between production and fruition.”
A catalog with texts by Lorenzo Bruni and a conversation with the artists will be published on the occasion of the.

The exhibition will be open from September 29 to December 15, 2018. It can be visited Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. For info visit www.galleriapoggiali.com.

Pictured: Grazia Toderi, Black Staircase (2006; lambda print on plexiglass, 70.5 x 125 cm)

Making Time: at Poggiali in Florence, the works of Slater Bradley, Park Chan-kyong and Grazia Toderi

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