With ARTXFOURthe Galleria SACCHETTI presents an exhibition platform for four emerging artists from the northern part of Switzerland for the first time in the Canton of Ticino. Myriam Mizzo Gämperli, Rodja RO* Galli, Nadia Hunziker and Alain LAIN Schibli engage the interfaces between graphic design, illustration, urban art, interior design, product design and fine art with curiosity, objectivity and insight. Their works, which are not tied to a client, have as their central point of reference the everyday (urban) culture in its multifaceted form. According to the formal principle of collage, the artists interweave elements in a new way and modify them using different media, and materials, and analog and digital techniques. The appropriation and rearrangement of already existing components leads to the creation of surprising, fresh pictorial worlds that break with visitors’ usual viewing habits.
The Galleria SACCHETTI presents paintings and object by the Swiss Alfons Bürgler. The artist calls his style of painting KÖRPERSCHRIFTEN. His works depict parallelly arranged and stacked abstract human figures in various poses. Sometimes flat, sometimes graphically set on the pictorial medium, Bürgler’s human figures dance, gesticulate, embrace, bounce or shake hands. In certain works more than one thousand figures bustle.
The human being is also the focus of Bürgler’s BAUMFIGUREN. The figures can be interpreted as three-dimensional executions of his KÖRPERSCHRIFTEN. Bürgler finds his material at the edge of woodlands. The artist takes bush and tree branches, rotates them 180 degrees and then forms figures with humanlike features with a saw and pruning shears. For his figures – small-scaled ones exist also as sculptural work in bronze – the artist founded the BAUMFIGUREN gallery in 2007: a private museum open to the public in Steinen, Canton of Schwyz.
The Galleria SACCHETTI presents new sculptures in bronze by the Dutch artist Hanneke Beaumont. “Who are we? What are we? Where are we going?”. Man’s perennial questions are echoed in Beaumont’s work. Many of her sculptures appear neither male nor female, neither young nor old. They do not appear to be portraits of particular individuals, nor are they modeled after idealized human forms. Fragile but strong, motionless but ready to move, these figures seem to be in a weightless spatial equilibrium – their human character tied to a string of thought.
The artist Rainer Bonk has traveled with a herd of ultramarine blue sheep across Europe since 2009. The animals, made of polyester, have already pastured in over 150 cities. In his work, Bonk combines artistic creativity with social engagement. Every public intervention with the blue sheep is guided by the moto: “Everyone is equal. Each one is important!”. As of spring 2018, the blue sheep can be viewed at Lake Maggiore in Ascona. The Galleria SACCHETTI is allowing the herd to graze in its idyllic garden until every blue sheep has found a new home.
The Galleria SACCHETTI presents new sculptures in wood and bronze by the Austrian Mario Dilitz. The artist creates concrete sculptures using natural materials which represent the compact surface, the external appearance of the human body. His figures are made from lime wood or cast in bronze, and when we encounter them and as we get to know them the form becomes a map of the soul in which socio-relevant sensibilities can be sounded out.
The Galleria SACCHETTI presents paintings and textile objects by Mela Kaltenegger. She formulates chromatic fresh images, in which esprit, gravity, irony and subtleness blithely come together. The artist pays particular attention to the depiction of women: they are magically floating on water, doing a handstand in a natural setting, reposing on a sofa or peeing under trees. Frequently pictured with them are animals, such as horses, fish, dogs, polar bears or rabbits. The female protagonists often appear with red high heels and boots, which can be read, with regard to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Red Shoes” (1845), as a symbol of freedom and rebellion, but also of sensuality and seduction. Kaltenegger lives and works in Vienna and exhibited at the SCOPE Art Show in Basel in 2017.
The Galleria SACCHETTI shows throughout the year 2018 wooden sculptures by the Swiss Daniel Eggli. Daniel Eggli’s instrument is the chain-saw. He is fascinated by its speed and the dynamic that arises during the carving. Out of one solid piece of wood he forms figures that are extracted from the everyday world: businessmen, women reading, golfers, divers and swimmers, hunters on the prowl or girls standing on a chair looking into the distance.
The Galleria SACCHETTI shows sculptures by the Swiss-Ecuadorian Alice Trepp and paintings by the Argentinian-Ecuadorian Ariel Dawi.
The life-size sculptures by Trepp were created as part of the art project LA CARGA, which launched more than ten years ago. The standing or sitting figures made of fiberglass are hand-painted in detail and depict portraits of women of the Afro-Ecuadorian community living in the Valle del Chota, a valley located in the north of Ecuador.
Ariel Dawi’s colorful compositions can be read as visual memories. They refer to the artist’s inner life, bringing the internal to the surface. With distance of time and space, what he has seen and experienced are brought to the canvas through brush and acrylic. Dawi utilizes a visual language that oscillates between abstraction and figuration.
The Galleria SACCHETTI opens the saison 2018 with new works by Petra Gabriele Dannehl who grew up in Davos and Hamburg. The focal point of her work is mankind. The figures in her paintings move between the realms of reality and dream and are defined through a conscious blurring of their attitude and movement in abstract space and context.
In addition, the Galleria SACCHETTI shows photographs by the Swiss-Italian Gregorio Esposito. They enter into dialogue with paintings and sculptures. The relationship between humans and nature form the source of Esposito’s artistic work. A particularly relevant piece in his black and white and color photographs is the contrasting pair “Silence” and “Movement.”
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