Le contraddizioni della fragilità

Born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1981, Al-Hadid grew up in the American Midwest. She received an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005 and attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Her work, known internationally, has been exhibited in important museums, spaces and galleries including: Galerie Isa, Ballard Estate, Mumbai, India (2021); The Momentary, Bentonville, AR (2021); The Welch Gallery, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA (2021); Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo (2019); The Frist Art Museum and Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, Nashville (2019); Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2019); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2018); Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York (2018); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2017); Mills College Art Museum, Oakland (2017); Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans (2016); The Vienna Secession, Vienna (2014); Nolli’s Orders, Akron Museum of Art, Akron (2013); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2012); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2011); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York (2007). She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Kasmin Gallery, New York (2021); Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL (2021); Lahore Biennale, Lahore, Pakistan (2020); Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY (2020); University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL (2020); Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges, Belgium (2020); Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY (2020); San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL (2020); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2019); Rabat Biennale, Rabat, Morocco (2019); Jameel Art Centre Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2019); Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2019); Phillips, New York, NY (2019); Eduardo Secci Contemporary, Florence, Italy (2019); Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2018); Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco (2017); John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2016); Galerie Isa, Mumbai (2015); Friedman Benda Gallery, New York (2014); The Farjam Foundation, Dubai (2014); Musèe Granet, Aix-en-Provence (2013); Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg (2012); RH Gallery, New York (2011); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2011); Thessaloniki State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2011); The Saatchi Gallery, London (2009); Center for Arts and Culture, Montabaur (2008).

Andrea Galvani was born in Italy in 1973. He lives and works between New York and Mexico City. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach that often draws upon scientific methodology, Galvani’s conceptual research informs his use of photography, video, drawing, sculpture, sound, architectural installation, and performance. His work seems to heighten awareness, articulate and extend the limits of sensory perception. Investigating relationships between fragility and monumentality, temporality and continuity, visibility and invisibility, his projects are documents of interventions orchestrated on site. Modifying and distorting natural surroundings, Galvani transforms the environment into a laboratory for physical experiments, cerebral observation, and collective action.

Galvani has exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York; the 4th Moscow Biennial for Contemporary Art; the Mediations Biennial, Poznań, Poland; 9th Biennial of Contemporary Art of Nicaragua; Art in General, New York; Aperture Foundation, New York; The Calder Foundation, New York; Pavilion – Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Bucharest; Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento; Macro Museum, Rome; GAMeC, Bergamo; De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Sculpture Center, New York; among others. His work is part of major public and private collections in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, including: the Permanent Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Deutsche Bank Collection, London; Artist Pension Trust, New York; the Contemporary Art Society, Aspen Collection, New York; the UniCredit Art Collection, Milan; the Permanent Collection of the United States Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC; the Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto; the 500 Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco; MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome; The Armory Show, New York and MACRO Testaccio, Rome.  He was a visiting artist at New York University, and has completed several artist residencies in New York, including Location One International Artist Residency Program, the LMCC Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MIA Artist Space Program/Columbia University School of the Arts. In 2011, he received the New York Exposure Prize and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2016, the Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto presented Galvani’s first mid-career retrospective in Europe. In 2017, his work was selected to represent the Deutsche Bank Collection at Frieze New York. In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Audemars Piguet Prize.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda was born in Mexico City in 1977, he has a Master’s degree in Arts from Hunter College, New York. He lives in Guadalajara Mexico. Alejandro has been influenced by living in different parts in Mexico and United States of America. He grew interest in how different cultures perceive danger and risk. Almanza’s endeavor focus on materiality concepts by challenging objects conceptually and physically in Sculptures and underwater photographs and videos. His work explores the culturally specific paradigms of safety, danger and architecture through the juxtaposition and pairing of materials and objects. These juxtapositions achieve a sense of tension from makeshift environments with specific connotations, such as fragility, value, weight and power. He integrates mundane materials into large-scale sculptures that challenge both the durability of the objects and his ability to create a stable structure. His frequent use of neon light-tubes, for instance, is due in part to his interest in the simultaneous fragility and strength of these objects that are easily shattered but, in some positions, can withstand significant pressure. Finding inspiration in the objects he selects, Almanza Pereda eschews narrative and prefers to focus on materiality. Though his work is influenced by Dutch still-life painting, it can touch on the surreal, especially in more recent work that experiments with underwater photography. He has done solo shows in different institutions like San Francisco Art Institute; Museo El Eco, Mexico City; Art in General New York; Stanley Rubin Center, El Paso TX; College of Wooster Art Museum Ohio; ChertLüdde in Berlin. His work has been featured at the Istanbul Biennal, ASU Museum; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Dublin Contemporary 2011; 6a Bienal de Curitiba Brazil; El Museo del Barrio and the Queens Museum, both in New York. Alejandro has attended the Skowhegan and Bemis Art Residencies program as well as a grant recipient of the CIFO Grant Program, the Harpo Foundation Grant program and the Harker Award for Interdisciplinary Studies. His work was featured in Art 21 close up series. He is currently a member of LA RUBIA TE BESA an Art band project.

Matthew Ritchie was born in London in 1964, graduated from Camberwell College of Art (BFA) in 1986 and emigrated to the United States in 1987. He lives and works in New York. His environmental installations of paintings, wall drawings, light boxes, games, sculpture, films and performance works are a continuous investigation of the idea of embodied information, explored through a shared universe of interconnected stories and images that draw from art, architecture, science, fiction, sociology, anthropology, mythology, history and the dynamics of culture, all unified by a unique, shared visual language. Ritchie describes the generation of systems, ideas, and their subsequent interpretations in a kind of cerebral web, concretizing ephemeral and intangible theories of information and time in a unique and recognizable gestural form that emphasizes the human trace.
In 1997, Ritchie began a series of paintings and installations titled The Main Sequence, which aimed to represent visually a theory of everything through a fragmented narrative. Each painting in the series developed as part of an interactive game that attempted to summarize an entire field of knowledge, such as physics and biology, into a multi-layered and immersive story. Ritchie is also committed to ambitious public art projects that can project complex ideas into shared spaces,  focusing on projects where the informational  content of the site can be integrated in to the architectural form of the work. Over the last several years, Ritchie also embarked on a project to chart a comprehensive visual history of the notational mark, or diagram. Divided into three parts, The Temptation of the Diagram, Surrender to the Diagram and The Demon in the Diagram, the ongoing project has thus far manifested in a series of paintings, performances, installations, and a publication that examines the influence on notational language on the systems and production of knowledge. Ritchie’s newest body of work, Time Diagrams, an ambitious one-hundred part sequence of paintings, floor, wall and performance works, seeks to examine the structure and informational language of history, in the same way The Main Sequence examined the informational language and structure of space.
Ritchie has exhibited internationally over the past two decades, including solo presentations at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX (2018); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2014); ZKM Karlsruhe (2012); Barbican Theatre, London, UK (2012); Brooklyn Academy of Music (2009), NY; St. Louis Art Museum, MO (2007); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2004); Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX (2003); and Dallas Museum of Art, TX (2001). He was recently the 2018-19 Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology. Ritchie’s work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the 2002 Sydney Biennale, the 2004 Bienal de Sao Paulo, the 2008 Seville Bienal, the Havana Bienal, and the 11th International Architecture Biennial, Venice, Italy (2008) as well as major exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY;  Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, MA among others.

José Carlos Martinat was born in Lima, Peru in 1974, where he lives and works. His art is at the interface of real and virtual worlds; his sources of inspiration are architecture and the urban milieu, human and cyberspace memories. His multimedia installations and sculptural assemblages incorporate a diversity of materials and strategies to alter preconceptions in regards to where things belong, he brings imprints meant for the street to the gallery, as an archeologist of sorts. This offhand methodology manifests in a number of manners.
Banner-like objects are made from transfers of political parties’ logos found in the city walls by means of lifting off the texture of the paint in resin. These Pintas are unmediated appropriations of political slogans fragments that end up pasted onto gallery walls. The fascination with architectural modernism is matched in Martinat’s case by a penchant for a certain kitsch aesthetic that he articulates with the inclusion of tagging, strident colour and street art strategies. His Ejercicios Superficiales series encompasses a number of bodies of work in different mediums that generally evoke the idea of superficiality in the use of readymade surfaces covered in graffiti.
The superficiality of his intention – or rather his love of the surface – is also present in the sculptural composition Monumentos Vandalizables – Abstracción del Poder presented in the Mercosul Biennale of 2009, where fragments of emblematic buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer for the futuristic Brasilia are built in white coated wood, and subsequently offered to the exhibition visitors to spray paint over them with slogans, graffiti and other intervention techniques. The dirtying of the icon could appear like a rebel boutade that conversely serves to perpetuate the iconography of modernism. It could also be a liberating force in the face of the widespread abuse of power. He has exhibited extensively internationally, including exhibitions at: Perez art museum, Miami (2018); Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Los Angeles, (2017); Museo de Arte de Zapopán, México (2017); XII Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (2015); VII and X Mercosur Biennale, Brasil (2009 and 2015); Saatchi Gallery, London (2014); Tate Modern, London (2013); Biennale of Visual Arts, Ireland (2012); Noord-Holland Biennale, Netherlands (2012); Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles (2012); IX Shanghai Biennale, China (2012); Estação Pinacoteca, Brazil (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2011); Trienal Poligráfica de Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico (2009); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo, Spain (2007); IFA (Germany), La Laboral, Spain (2007); MALI, Lima (Lima), among others. His work is part of international collections, including: Tate Modern (London, UK); MoMA (New York, USA); Malba (Buenos Aires,Argentina); Saatchi Collection (London, UK); Mali (Lima, Perú). He is represented by Galería Leme in São Paulo and Revolver Galería (Lima-Perú y Buenos Aires-Argentina).