Ian Tweedy
05 Feb - 26 Mar 2011
Two years on from his debut show in Italy, Monitor is proud to present Ian Tweedy’s second solo show in this country.
The young American artist’s latest project, entirely conceived for the spacious rooms of the gallery - transformed into a kind of museum venue for the occasion - incorporates paintings, sculpture and wall hangings in a play of superimpositions, relations and inter-communicating synergies that together encapsulate the artistic research that Tweedy has carried out over the past two years.
Each of the gallery’s two rooms has been devoted to a particular theme. In the first room, entirely painted in a subtle green that verges on grey, the artist explores issues related to growth, sublimation, the process of rising from ground to sky, through a series of traces, drippings, shadows and stratified nuances between colours. Old books, little air travel mementoes, even a kind of self-portrait carved out of cork – all are drenched in colour like a palette symbolising the manual, physical work process of the artist. The paintings present in this room almost give the impression of being by different artists – perhaps because they have been overlaid on images by others (like reinterpreted objets trouvés), striking up a kind of cohabitation or coexistence. In this space Tweedy has created a representation of the artist’s studio where ideas, colours, aspirations and failures are jumbled together into a single state of being.
In the second room, charged with a well-saturated, dry shade of brown, Tweedy investigates another of his favourite themes – decadence, the past and the personal roots of the individual. The tower stands as a symbol of this process of decay as if marking the end of a life cycle, a monument to a forgotten civilisation of the past. The viewer’s gaze scans a scale of monochromes where the absence of colour is heightened by images painted on the rear of 1950s canvases collected by Tweedy. These objects are dark, dusty, fragile and hard all at the same time, while the images chosen by the artist are a fusion of the dramatic, the tragic and the classical. Within this panorama, the eye is caught by small and precious sculptural elements, bullet-studded artefacts from the Great War and highly elaborate drawings of female nudes that – here and there in a play of transparencies – reveal flowing hair, a shoulder, cheeks and hands. These are miniscule monuments to the idea of loss and desire, dedicated to those women who played a fundamental role in all of history’s ‘resistances’.
Tweedy has always been drawn to the idea of Origin and here he is musing on the communicative value of what will remain of Western society. Tweedy has created and inserted his own ‘gap’ in history, generating a form of defect and relating his world of artist and creator of images with a hypothetical past populated by his personal flotsam – his own time machines gazing towards, exorcising and safeguarding a dark, distant future.
Ian Tweedy (Hahn, Germany, 1982 lives and works in New York).
Solo shows: 2009: ‘70 Zeppelins’, EX3 Centro per l’Arte Contemporaneo, Florence, curated by Lorenzo Giusti; ‘Without a Glimmer of Remorse’, Monitor Gallery, Rome; 2008: ‘I’ll Meet You at the Rendezvous’, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, curated by Alessandro Rabottini. Group Shows: 2010: ‘21 x 21 - Twenty one artists for the 21st Century’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; 2009: ‘No Soul for Sale’, A Festival of Independents, Perfomance for Mousse Magazine, X Initiative, New York, curated by Cecilia Alemani; ‘Usages de Document’, Centre Culturel Suisse à Paris, Paris; ‘IMO3 - L’Immagine Sottile’, Galleria Comunale Di Monfalcone (GO), curated by Andrea Bruciati; 2008: ‘50 Moons of Saturn’, Triennale di Torino, Castello di Rivoli (TO), curated by Daniel Birnbaum; 2007: Der Prozess, Prague Biennale 3, Prague curated by Marco Scotini; Cities from Below, Fondazione Teseco, Pisa, curated by Marco Scotini; 2006 ‘Un lavoro fatto ad arte’, Palazzo Te, Mantova, curated by Veronica Pirola
The young American artist’s latest project, entirely conceived for the spacious rooms of the gallery - transformed into a kind of museum venue for the occasion - incorporates paintings, sculpture and wall hangings in a play of superimpositions, relations and inter-communicating synergies that together encapsulate the artistic research that Tweedy has carried out over the past two years.
Each of the gallery’s two rooms has been devoted to a particular theme. In the first room, entirely painted in a subtle green that verges on grey, the artist explores issues related to growth, sublimation, the process of rising from ground to sky, through a series of traces, drippings, shadows and stratified nuances between colours. Old books, little air travel mementoes, even a kind of self-portrait carved out of cork – all are drenched in colour like a palette symbolising the manual, physical work process of the artist. The paintings present in this room almost give the impression of being by different artists – perhaps because they have been overlaid on images by others (like reinterpreted objets trouvés), striking up a kind of cohabitation or coexistence. In this space Tweedy has created a representation of the artist’s studio where ideas, colours, aspirations and failures are jumbled together into a single state of being.
In the second room, charged with a well-saturated, dry shade of brown, Tweedy investigates another of his favourite themes – decadence, the past and the personal roots of the individual. The tower stands as a symbol of this process of decay as if marking the end of a life cycle, a monument to a forgotten civilisation of the past. The viewer’s gaze scans a scale of monochromes where the absence of colour is heightened by images painted on the rear of 1950s canvases collected by Tweedy. These objects are dark, dusty, fragile and hard all at the same time, while the images chosen by the artist are a fusion of the dramatic, the tragic and the classical. Within this panorama, the eye is caught by small and precious sculptural elements, bullet-studded artefacts from the Great War and highly elaborate drawings of female nudes that – here and there in a play of transparencies – reveal flowing hair, a shoulder, cheeks and hands. These are miniscule monuments to the idea of loss and desire, dedicated to those women who played a fundamental role in all of history’s ‘resistances’.
Tweedy has always been drawn to the idea of Origin and here he is musing on the communicative value of what will remain of Western society. Tweedy has created and inserted his own ‘gap’ in history, generating a form of defect and relating his world of artist and creator of images with a hypothetical past populated by his personal flotsam – his own time machines gazing towards, exorcising and safeguarding a dark, distant future.
Ian Tweedy (Hahn, Germany, 1982 lives and works in New York).
Solo shows: 2009: ‘70 Zeppelins’, EX3 Centro per l’Arte Contemporaneo, Florence, curated by Lorenzo Giusti; ‘Without a Glimmer of Remorse’, Monitor Gallery, Rome; 2008: ‘I’ll Meet You at the Rendezvous’, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, curated by Alessandro Rabottini. Group Shows: 2010: ‘21 x 21 - Twenty one artists for the 21st Century’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; 2009: ‘No Soul for Sale’, A Festival of Independents, Perfomance for Mousse Magazine, X Initiative, New York, curated by Cecilia Alemani; ‘Usages de Document’, Centre Culturel Suisse à Paris, Paris; ‘IMO3 - L’Immagine Sottile’, Galleria Comunale Di Monfalcone (GO), curated by Andrea Bruciati; 2008: ‘50 Moons of Saturn’, Triennale di Torino, Castello di Rivoli (TO), curated by Daniel Birnbaum; 2007: Der Prozess, Prague Biennale 3, Prague curated by Marco Scotini; Cities from Below, Fondazione Teseco, Pisa, curated by Marco Scotini; 2006 ‘Un lavoro fatto ad arte’, Palazzo Te, Mantova, curated by Veronica Pirola