The Material Body of Art

The gallery A plus in Venice is pleased to announce the exhibition The Material Body of Art, which will open on December 13, 2016 at 18:00

The exhibition is held in conjunction with the third edition of VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK, where the gallery A plus A has been invited to participate in taking care of a section dedicated to performers from Eastern European countries. The event will take place at Palazzo Mora and Palazzo Michiel in Venice from 10 to 17 December 2016 under the title "Fragile Body - Material Body".

The material body of art is a collective that brings together the spaces of the gallery A plus in the works of the artists cechiJiří Kolář, Běla Kolářová, Milan Knizak, Slovenians OHO, Irwin and Matej Stupica, Bosnian and Montenegrin Mladen Miljanovic Lenka orojeviÄ Ä ‡, united by the use of the technique of collage. An art form which, starting from the sixties marks aesthetics typical in Eastern European countries linked to the peculiarities of the life of the totalitarian regime that had led to the development of a collective imagination, expressed through works created using everyday objects.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the research emerged in the sixties that sees the artists, like the members of the Czech avant, refined and at the same time determined opponents of a society that could be challenged only through irony. The exhibition continues with the Slovenian artists of the Irwin group, which in the eighties have experienced the system as a form of transition up to the younger expressions like Slovenian Matej Stupica that works together with the Montenegrin Lenka orojeviÄ Ä ‡ and the Bosnian Mladen Miljanovic.

These are works that show what are the icons of the consumption of a company outside the capitalist framework and develops a parallel imaginary reality in which "the other" burst powerfully in the work of individual artists. The authors trigger a process that is the opposite performative act in which art is no longer an object but instead penetrates, through the artist's body, in real life. Not surprisingly, they are often the very same authors to create numerous collages and at the same time addressing an art form such as performance.

The third edition of the Performance Week was an opportunity to compare two parallel channels of expression. On the one hand the performance art that uses the body to forcefully break into real life and other forms of art that have used the collage to allow the reality to invade with everyday objects the work of art.

December 13, from 11:00 to 13:00 at the theater of the Palazzo Grassi in walking distance from Gallery A plus A will hold a roundtable to analyze the phenomena of performance in Eastern Europe. Artists and curators will discuss the issue of forms of art born in a system outside of the schemes such as that of the former Yugoslavia.