Pietro Roccasalva
F.E.S.T.A.
8 February–23 March 2014
Kölnischer Kunstverein
Hahnenstraße 6
50667 Cologne
Germany
T +49 (0) 221 217021
info [at] koelnischerkunstverein.de
The Kölnischer Kunstverein is pleased to present F.E.S.T.A., Pietro Roccasalva’s first solo exhibition in a German public institution. The show comprises both older and recent works by Roccasalva and provides a cross section of the different areas in which the artist works.
In Roccasalva’s work painting is the constant centre of an ever-expanding constellation of different media. The artist’s work encompasses disparate elements such as sculpture, video, neon lighting and tableaux vivant, which always find their point of departure and their conclusion in painting.
The common subject of the different works are Roccasalva’s personal visions, which are influenced by the circumstances and coincidences that he encounters in each new context.
Often a work bears traces of something that has preceded it: there is a constant referring to iconographies, which repeat themselves in various ways and generate new situations. In his exhibitions the flow of information is arranged in different “stages” which are formally closed and autonomous, but also need to be seen as an important part of a wider process. Fluidity and solidity, they pursue one another and interweave till they crystallise in the two-dimensional dynamic of the “processor”: the painting.
F.E.S.T.A. is a project that reveals the intrinsic relationship between artistic activity and the concept of “inactivity,” which isn’t an absence of work/activity rather a mode of potentiality which is not exhausted in the work. The exhibition is an assertion of this dimension suspended between “work” and “non-work.” Each piece declaims in different ways the material presence of a void, the manifestation of the absence on which Roccasalva’s work is paradoxically based.
Roccasalva (lives and works in Milan) has attracted international attention through his participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale and his contribution to Manifesta 7; most recently, the artist’s work was shown in a comprehensive solo show in Le Magasin, Grenoble.
Exhibition tours: 19 February and 19 March at 5pm
Catalogue: A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.
