Artist: Rita McBride
Venue: Alfonso Artiaco, Naples
Exhibition Title: Pattern and Decoration
Date: September 12 – October 31, 2014
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Alfonso Artiaco, Naples
Press Release:
Rita McBride comes back to Alfonso Artiaco gallery after the last exhibitions in 2007 and in 2010 with “Pattern e Decoration”. The American artist creates a series of templates from steel and brass which investigate the relationship between modernism and craft. McBride’s templates are tools for pattern recognition, they decode the complexity and proliferation of images: images of ideas, images of images, ideas of ideas. Mcbride’s new works are based on iconic popular shapes used in decoupage, quilting, wallpaper ornament and weaving, but are transformed to deflect the non objective modernist grid, lifting its logic but denying its reductivism. Rita McBride investigates through these works her Idealism about decoration, presenting a clear split from the “strict instruction” of reductive minimalism, and challenging the hierarchy which places fine art above applied arts. In this exhibition ‘Pattern and Decoration‘ McBride also examines the legacy and influences in her own work of the seminal 1970’s art movement of the same name.
Rita McBride, born in 1960 in Des Moines (Iowa), is well known both in Europe and in the USA for a research that smartly blends tropes from minimalist sculpture, industrial design and modernist architecture. In her sculptures and installations, Rita McBride explores public space, architecture, and the built environment, playing with scale and materials to transform the familiar into the unexpected. Drawing on the visual language of Minimalist sculpture and Modernist architecture, McBride simultaneously alludes to and subverts their utopian aspirations and notions of technological, industrial progress. In 2011, she completed Mae West, a 52-meter- high carbon steel sculpture located on the Effnerplatz in Munich, among the largest sculptures ever built. McBride is currently director of the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions, including solo shows at venues including the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2012, Kunsthalle Bern in 2008, SculptureCenter in 2004, and the Wiener Secession in 2000, among many others. She has also participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Witte de With in Rotterdam, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, MoMA PS1, The Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the New Museum, and the Tate Modern.