Rosa Barba
28 May - 19 Jul 2013
ROSA BARBA
The Mute Veracity of Matter
28 May - 19 July 2013
Giò Marconi is very pleased to present The Mute Veracity of Matter, the second solo exhibition of Italian artist Rosa Barba.
Her work engages questions of time like inscriptions in landscapes and language and cuts across history and subject matter. Rosa Barba is especially interested in abstracting the cinematographic medium to push limits and possibilities.
Like the structuralists, she is preoccupied by the immanent aspects of film – the workings of projectors, perception in space, the materiality of the medium as expressed not just optically but in sound and in time.
At Giò Marconi, the artist presents the 35 mm film Time as Perspective (2012), a big felt sculpture The Contemplative or the Speculative (2013), kinetic sculptures like Still Anchored in One Point from which They Emerge (2013), Footnotes (2013), Color Clocks: Verticals Lean Occasionally Consistently Away from Viewpoints (2012) and the installation Color Studies (2013).
Time as Perspective was launched at the Kunsthaus Zurich for Rosa Barba’s solo exhibition in 2012 and was co-commissioned by the Kunsthall Bergen where the show was on recently (till March 2013) in a modified and slightly extended version. The film was shot in the Texan desert and shows huge oil pumps constantly repeating the same mechanical movement. Beside its meditative sculptural quality in the landscape, it touches on strong social and political issues with its references to exploitation of natural resources.
Rosa Barba has always been fascinated by vast and arid landscapes, particularly the desert for its seemingly endless perspective. The point of time in Time as Perspective is unclear and it could therefore be a futuristic vision or an historical document.
Rosa Barba’s films deal with the aspect of time, not only as a progressive linear motion but also as something that unfolds in layers of depth. In the artist’s words: “Time intervals stacked one over another in a kind of geological ‘deep time’ form the basis for much of my thinking about the film medium.” As such, the film becomes an imprint of the depth of time, where one can see or sense a spatial structure inward into the story, with all its strata and transformations.
The Contemplative or the Speculative is a large black felt tapestry, suspended from the ceiling and illuminated by a projector. The text is punched into the felt but the tapestry’s materiality negates its legibility: the words can only be read clearly on the wall behind. In the artist’s words “a secret reading room” is created.
In Color Studies the artist brings the three primary colors into a productive dialogue by sharing the same projection screen and therefore creating infinite possibilities of colors.
The three sculptures Color Clocks: Verticals Lean Occasionally Consistently Away from Viewpoints are considered “kinetic paintings” by the artist. They are three triangular mechanical instruments inside which a 35mm celluloid strip with printed text is constantly moving. Each of the three film strips reproduces a color with the word red, blue or yellow. These sculptures are reminiscent of the internal mechanism of a clock but they are different in the sense that they do not define time but reverse it in an endless loop. It’s a meditation on color, time, perception and language, on the meaning of a word when repeated infinitively.
Rosa Barba was born in Agrigento in 1972 and grew up in Germany where she studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne followed by a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Recent solo exhibitions include:
A Home for a Unique Individual, MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León, León; Time as Perspective, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2013); Time as Perspective, Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich; Back Door Exposure, Jeu de Paume, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis; Arter, Istanbul (2012); Stage Archive, Fondazione Galleria Civica - Center of Research on Contemporary Art, Trento; Stage Archive, MART Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto; Kunstverein, Braunschweig (2011); TATE Modern, London; Center of Contemporary Arts, Tel Aviv; Centre International d’Art & du Paysage, Vassivère (2010).
Rosa Barba’s work has been featured in numerous group shows:
Ankäufe, Bundeskunstsammlung, Bonn (2013); Film and Sculpture, Wiels Brussels; Man in the Holocene, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Pink Caviar, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Macro, Rome; A Trip to the Moon. Before and After Film, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Made in Germany 2, Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Collezione ACACIA, Palazzo Reale, Milan (2012); Making Worlds, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 53rd Venice Biennial (2009); 52nd Venice Biennial, Slovenian Pavillon, (2007). She is represented in important public collections, amongst them: Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea (GAM), Torino; Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Mart - Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto; Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
The Mute Veracity of Matter
28 May - 19 July 2013
Giò Marconi is very pleased to present The Mute Veracity of Matter, the second solo exhibition of Italian artist Rosa Barba.
Her work engages questions of time like inscriptions in landscapes and language and cuts across history and subject matter. Rosa Barba is especially interested in abstracting the cinematographic medium to push limits and possibilities.
Like the structuralists, she is preoccupied by the immanent aspects of film – the workings of projectors, perception in space, the materiality of the medium as expressed not just optically but in sound and in time.
At Giò Marconi, the artist presents the 35 mm film Time as Perspective (2012), a big felt sculpture The Contemplative or the Speculative (2013), kinetic sculptures like Still Anchored in One Point from which They Emerge (2013), Footnotes (2013), Color Clocks: Verticals Lean Occasionally Consistently Away from Viewpoints (2012) and the installation Color Studies (2013).
Time as Perspective was launched at the Kunsthaus Zurich for Rosa Barba’s solo exhibition in 2012 and was co-commissioned by the Kunsthall Bergen where the show was on recently (till March 2013) in a modified and slightly extended version. The film was shot in the Texan desert and shows huge oil pumps constantly repeating the same mechanical movement. Beside its meditative sculptural quality in the landscape, it touches on strong social and political issues with its references to exploitation of natural resources.
Rosa Barba has always been fascinated by vast and arid landscapes, particularly the desert for its seemingly endless perspective. The point of time in Time as Perspective is unclear and it could therefore be a futuristic vision or an historical document.
Rosa Barba’s films deal with the aspect of time, not only as a progressive linear motion but also as something that unfolds in layers of depth. In the artist’s words: “Time intervals stacked one over another in a kind of geological ‘deep time’ form the basis for much of my thinking about the film medium.” As such, the film becomes an imprint of the depth of time, where one can see or sense a spatial structure inward into the story, with all its strata and transformations.
The Contemplative or the Speculative is a large black felt tapestry, suspended from the ceiling and illuminated by a projector. The text is punched into the felt but the tapestry’s materiality negates its legibility: the words can only be read clearly on the wall behind. In the artist’s words “a secret reading room” is created.
In Color Studies the artist brings the three primary colors into a productive dialogue by sharing the same projection screen and therefore creating infinite possibilities of colors.
The three sculptures Color Clocks: Verticals Lean Occasionally Consistently Away from Viewpoints are considered “kinetic paintings” by the artist. They are three triangular mechanical instruments inside which a 35mm celluloid strip with printed text is constantly moving. Each of the three film strips reproduces a color with the word red, blue or yellow. These sculptures are reminiscent of the internal mechanism of a clock but they are different in the sense that they do not define time but reverse it in an endless loop. It’s a meditation on color, time, perception and language, on the meaning of a word when repeated infinitively.
Rosa Barba was born in Agrigento in 1972 and grew up in Germany where she studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne followed by a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Recent solo exhibitions include:
A Home for a Unique Individual, MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León, León; Time as Perspective, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2013); Time as Perspective, Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich; Back Door Exposure, Jeu de Paume, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis; Arter, Istanbul (2012); Stage Archive, Fondazione Galleria Civica - Center of Research on Contemporary Art, Trento; Stage Archive, MART Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto; Kunstverein, Braunschweig (2011); TATE Modern, London; Center of Contemporary Arts, Tel Aviv; Centre International d’Art & du Paysage, Vassivère (2010).
Rosa Barba’s work has been featured in numerous group shows:
Ankäufe, Bundeskunstsammlung, Bonn (2013); Film and Sculpture, Wiels Brussels; Man in the Holocene, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Pink Caviar, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Macro, Rome; A Trip to the Moon. Before and After Film, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Made in Germany 2, Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Collezione ACACIA, Palazzo Reale, Milan (2012); Making Worlds, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 53rd Venice Biennial (2009); 52nd Venice Biennial, Slovenian Pavillon, (2007). She is represented in important public collections, amongst them: Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea (GAM), Torino; Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Mart - Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto; Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.