 Amy O'Neill: Maggot Muncher #14, 2003 Courtesy by the artist Vidya Gastaldon, Amy O'Neill, Pierre Vadi The Centre d'Art Contemporain is proud to present three artists based in Switzerland. Featuring mostly new works, drawings and sculptures, the exhibition draws on an aesthetic of sweet beauty punctured by an underlying presence of unease, violence and even death. Flirting with elements derived from USA popular culture, Gastaldon's, O'Neill's and Vadi's work offer us a view into their "beautiful and terrifying" worlds, which include amongst others, the following works. French artist Vidya Gastaldon, Geneva based, presents "The road of Oz" (2003). This work is inspired by the yellow brick road central to Hollywood's film "Wizard of Oz" (1939), starring Judy Garland. Lovingly hand crafted by the artist from soft, yellow cloth, the road invites the visitor on a journey through the exhibition which, much like the film, traverses landscapes of wonder and delight, darkness and evil. Continuing her longstanding interest in the everyday carnivalesque and its potential for social critique, American born artist Amy O'Neill, living in Geneva, presents a series of ink drawings titled "Skulls" (2003). Their raw style, belies an almost classic approach to portraiture. Featuring "the dead" with an attitude "Skulls" is shot through with references to rock culture, the tattoo parlour, and other rockabilia which has fascinated Swiss and American youths for decades. Both angry and humourous these portraits retain, nevertheless, a meditative and ambiguous quality. Likewise Genevan artist Pierre Vadi's sculpture "Flower Power" (2003), whose referents to 1970s love and peace mottos are evident, plays dramatically with feelings of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, nature and artifice. Made from painted, expanded mousse, with a bubbly surface, the suspended sculpture's fragments visually regroup into a sumptuous, opening scarlet flower. Yet at a second glance, we also perceive an explosion of flesh. In either case the implied movement is fixed in space, frozen mid-way. Exhibition: July 12 - September 28, 2003 Hours: Tue-Sun 11 am - 6 pm Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève (3rd Floor) 10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers 1205 Genève Tél. +41 22 329 18 42 Fax +41 22 329 18 86 E-Mail: cacge@worldcom.ch |
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