l think that fantasy world is part of the real one

Raffaella Cortese Gallery is pleased to present a personal show of new works by the New York artist Jessica Stockholder.

The American artist’s installations, often on a grand scale, have won her international acclaim for crossing the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, and for using recycled materials assembled with an extraordinary pictorial sensitivity. In her work, colour is a very important component: it is garish, intense and unsettling.

Four new installations are on display in the gallery – big “sculptures” that show off her fresh formal vocabulary rich in interpretative possibilities: they seem familiar both for their use of banal materials, everyday articles, and for their associations which recall poetic images to mind.

In a complex process Stockholder reveals the essence of her own experience and makes it intelligible to viewers, not as a personal biography but as an abstract analysis that necessarily keeps at its core the emotions of an individuai experience.

By the very choice of materials, conceptually and formally, she invites us to consider the temporary nature of her objects and installations – and by extension of our bodies, ourselves, our social and cultural structures. Her work confronts us with our ephemeral nature and with our individual and collective death.

Stockholder develops this strong reflection with a lot of poetry: magically, ordinary things become art works, and newspapers, plastic balls, pasteboards, spot lights blend in a colourful ensemble in order to transform our perception of the room’s space.