Villa del Arte Galleries presents the work of French artist Serge Mendjisky for the first time in Barcelona.

The solo exhibition “La Ville au Coeur”, opening on 20th December, comprises eighteen works encompassing the artist’s perspectivist vision of the cities that have captured his heart.

A member of the École de Paris, Serge Mendjisky (1929) studied fine art in the French capital, where he met and moved in the same circles as artists such as Picasso, Soutine, Braque and Léger. Towards the end of the 90s, photography became an important part of his artistic research. This evolution of his work did not however make him a photographer, but rather a multidisciplinary artist capable of shaping and reinterpreting images, capturing the spirit of places and items. The artist uses collage to convert the image into a macro-photo and therefore give life to his multi faceted world, creating the perspectivist technique. The multiple points of view, strips of images and their subsequent semi-ordered reconstruction are a clear and contemporary homage to the Cubist movement, whereby the three dimensions merge to depict various view points of one single image.

Precision plays a constant companion to the artist’s inspiration in the creative process; he designs his works using an entire wall of his studio as a backdrop. Strips of images hang from the wall, moving freely to create a first draft with which the artist then creates a deliberately unpredictable final image.

By deconstructing and reconstructing the images of some of the most important cities in the world, Serge Mendjisky creates new and spectacular urban scenes that make us question our sense of perception; paying homage to his childhood homes of Saint-Paul-de-Venice and Paris, as well as Tokyo, Venice, Moscow, Fez and Jerusalem. New York is his greatest source of inspiration, owing to its verticality and labyrinthine streets abruptly carved out like city canyons, and in particular Manhattan with its eternal transformation process and repetitive yet varied structures, which provide an inherent sense of fragmentation.

Serge Mendjisky’s work has been acquired by more than twenty-five international museums and forms part of prestigious collections worldwide.

Exhibition:
Serge Mendjisky, “La Ville au Coeur”
Dates:
21st December 2012 to 21st January 2013
Open every day from 10:00 to 20:00
Free entrance
Vernissage:
Thursday 20th December at 19:00

Villa del Arte Galleries
C/ Tapineria, 39,
08002 Barcelona
Tel. 93 268 06 73
E-mail: info@villadelarte.com
www.villadelarte.com