Olivia Pendergast comes to Italy for the first time and brings Kindness to Rome. The Invisible Evidence

Coming to Rome, from December 7 to 28, 2018, in the studio spaces of SALA2Architettura, located in the building complex of the Pontifical Sanctuary of the Scala Santa, is Kindness. Invisible Evidence, a work by U.S. artist Olivia Pendergast that, after the success of the first stage in Cosenza, comes to the capital. The event is organized in collaboration with the TRAleVOLTE Gallery and will be preceded by a press conference on December 6 at 4 p.m., at MACRO Asilo, which will also be an opportunity to present the exhibition catalog and discuss it with the artist, for the first time in Italy, and the curator, Daniele Garritano, as well as to attend, for the first time ever, the screening of Natasha Sweeney’s docu-interview Olivia Pendergast - RELATE.

The exhibition presents the work of Olivia Pendergast, an American artist who, fascinated by African style and culture, explores the reality of Nairobi’s poorest and most overcrowded suburbs. Pendergast’s portraits tell, therefore, of African slums, but with a pointed and unprecedented gaze, not divisive as is normally the case, nor dualistic, because the point of observation is direct. It is no accident that Olivia chose to live and work in Kenya. Thus unfiltered, with an unmediated approach, Kindness, as curator Daniele Garritano argues, “is testimony to the strength of the female community and the bonds that constitute the networks of family relationships.” Kindness, “kindness” precisely, the precious gem of human relationships, constitutes the summa of the experience of those bonds that, though invisible, strengthen generations. The protagonist is the intuition of a familiarity founded on the maternal principle, as a form of mutual understanding that passes through the evidence of a generative force.

The artistic mode employed by Pendergast is the portrait, because, like the art of storytelling, it offers “the possibility of approaching the lives of those who are different from us, with a deeper interest deep than that of a mere tourist, with understanding and participation, and coming to perceive the grave error our society commits by refusing to consider people in their reality, without deformation” (Martha Nussbaum).

Olivia Pendergast attended Columbus College of Art and Design for five years, where she studied mainly illustration but never set aside her true passion for painting. After working for a while in the Los Angeles film industry as a conceptual designer, his drive to return to painting hardened: he cut up his credit cards and moved to a cabin in the mountains of Utah, where he painted full time. In 2008, he traveled to Africa for the first time and began living in Malawi, painting portraits. She also traveled to Haiti and Bangladesh before finally leaving the United States in 2016 to move to Kenya. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Nairobi, where she is an artist and mother. Since 1999, her works have been exhibited between the United States, Dubai, Malawi, Ethiopia and Kenya.

Pictured: Olivia Pendergast, A6 (2018; oil on canvas, 92 x 93 cm)

Olivia Pendergast comes to Italy for the first time and brings Kindness to Rome. The Invisible Evidence

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