Galeria Luisa Strina is delighted to present a group show including works by Jimmie Durham, Cildo Meireles, and Pedro Cabrita Reis. The exhibition will feature works by the three internationally renowned conceptual artists who have in common to work on simple materials and everyday life items reassembled in order to gain a suggestive power of association.

The show is organized in collaboration with Sprovieri Gallery, London, where it was presented from October 2nd to November 23, 2018.

Pedro Cabrita Reis presents three new works realized specifically for the show. His complex practice is characterized by an idiosyncratic philosophical and poetical discourse embracing a great variety of means: painting, photography, drawing, and sculptures composed of industrial and found materials alongside with manufactured objects. Focused on questions relative to space and memory, the equilibrium between light and matter is expressed in the balance between architecture and image and “creates a reality in its own right, instead of reproducing it”. (Pedro Cabrita Reis)

In Durham’s sculptures and assemblages appears a mix of organic and artificial found items (including bones, plastic pieces, car parts and pipes), often re-composed questioning the fragile balance between nature and industry. The various elements co-exist among them in a visual clash at the same time poetic, funky, and decadent building up ambiguous and potentially endless layers of meaning. “We are in search of structures of signification: underneath a picture there is always another picture”. (Jimmie Durham)

Each piece in the show opens to new interpretations of the world and subverts its rules. Paradigmatic is Cildo Meireles’s work, where often the viewer’s perception, or even imagination, has an active role capable to alter it. In the lightbox Atlas (1995-2006), instead, the artist portrays himself – not without irony – as an opposite version of the myth of Atlas. Smiling, Meireles is standing upside down on Piero Manzoni’s famous pedestal of the world, Base del Mondo. In the words of the artist: “I am interested in the paradoxical relationship between objects”. (Cildo Meireles)