From Friday 4 October 2019 to Sunday 2 February 2020 at the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio-USI opens the exhibition “KOEN VANMECHELEN - THE WORTH OF LIFE - 1982/2019” promoted by the Fondazione Teatro dell’architettura. An extensive review over more than sixty-five works by the artist Koen Vanmechelen: sculptures, paintings, neon, lambda prints and installations set up outside and in the three floors of theTeatro dell’architettura Mendrisio, the new campus building designed by architect Mario Botta.
THE EXHIBITION
Artist of international renown based in Belgium, sculptor, painter, performer, filmmaker and scholar, as well as a human rights activist, Koen Vanmechelen has centered his work as an artist on the relation between nature and culture. Moreover - and all throughout the course of an almost forty-years-long journey - he has rounded out his projects for the hybridization of either animals or plants with the contamination of figurative arts, of materials and media, making formal proliferation within conceptual complexity his own, personal earmark on a creative universe that is as unique as it is unmistakable. His art is at the same time the expression of both an aesthetic of wonder and an ethic that is rooted in the very worth of life. From the first wooden sculptures in the 80’s, to a vast project of research - aimed at the generation of new breeds of poultry - to the recent opening of a tremendous biodiversity park called LABIOMISTA, where great architectures and natural landscapes are inhabited by installations, artworks and birds of the most disparate kinds.
“Koen Vanmechelen - The Worth of Life – 1982/2019” curated by Didi Bozzini, is an exhibition of more than sixty-five pieces - which were all realized between 1982 and 2019 - intended to highlight the more strictly plastic aspects of this artist’s body of work, with particular regards to his neo-baroque disposition. Vanmechelen’s imagination - which orbits around the figure of the chicken as an incarnate symbol of bio-cultural evolution - feeds in fact on iconographic repetitions and semantic accumulations, on metaphors and metamorphoses, on theatrics and allegories, all in order to create a protean visual universe, unsettled and uneven - like seed-pearl - namely baroque. A universe of powerful emotional impact, all trodden in its extension by the very energy of life as much as by the exuberance of creative gesture, where the intellect’s enticement is above all a consequence of the aesthetic involvement and visceral appeal that the transmutation of natural forms into chimeric images exerts upon the eye. For Vanmechelen sees art as a practice of re-invention of nature, a privileged access door to its secrets and essential requirement to its preservation. And, symmetrically, he calls upon science, almost as if it were a branch of poetry, to somehow magically turn his reveries’ visions into reality.
EXHIBITION FACTS
“Koen Vanmechelen - The Worth of Life - 1982/2019” 4 October 2019 – 2 Febrary 2020 Curated by Didi Bozzini
Exhibition promoted by Fondazione Teatro dell’architettura Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio Via Turconi 25 6850 Mendrisio, Svizzera
more information on the website
