Let's continue the ceramic thread that started with yesterday's post by looking at an exhibition opening next week at the Milan-based Gió Marconi Gallery (Via Tadino 20).
"Period" by Canadian-born London-based artist Allison Katz (opening on Tuesday until 10th November 2018) will indeed focus on ceramics and in particular on glazed plates.
Katz, who studied at Concordia University in Montreal before moving to New York and then settling down in London, is more famous for her paintings and posters, like the ones exhibited during the summer as part of her first solo exhibition in the States (organised at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston) - "Diary w/o Dates".
That event featured twelve paintings in which the artist explored the fracture between the past and the future, creating juxtapositions or parallelisms revolving around themes such as time, order and disorder.
Nature, the body and the city are just some of the topics Katz touches upon in her paintings, often characterised by vibrantly clashing shades, but also by contrasting feelings and moods.
Some of these themes and the glossary Katz created in her paintings reappear in her ceramic pieces, but with a new added value - the artist's deep fascination with the possibilities offered by ceramic and by the different techniques used to create these pieces and the materiality of the glazes.
Katz started experimenting with this format around 2011, concentrating more on this medium during the summer of 2017 while on residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy.
The glazes were inspired by Katz's studies in the history of ceramics from the Umbria region: one of the manufacturing stages that interests the artist the most was the transformation inside the kiln since it represents a sort of point of no return, the stage when the glaze finally seals the piece. Katz was particularly attracted by the outstanding tin-glazed earthenware in Deruta.
In "Period" Katz's themes come back on the plates, they are used as a personal glossary and alphabet, a symbolic system replicated on everyday (but non-functional) objects - plates.
This visual lexicon made of black pears, noses, roosters, monkeys and models, tells colourful stories and replicates vignettes onto ceramics in the form of a diary: at times the images hint at puns and word associations, creating a juxtaposition between the artist's visual and verbal codes.
This is not the first time Katz exhibited at the Gió Marconi Gallery: a couple of years ago she did a site-specific installation of paintings at the gallery, but the event symbolically opens another chapter in Katz's career since it anticipates the publication of the first monograph about her work, due in December.
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