ARTUNER celebrates its 5th year anniversary with a group exhibition featuring works by Juan Antonio Olivares, Josh Kline, Caroline Walker, David Czupryn, Des Lawrence, and Pia Krajewski. We are taking this opportunity to look deeper into the zeitgeist of our epoch through contemporary artists’ responses to the age-old genre of portraiture.
We are happy to present The World’s Your Oyster, an exhibition curated by ARTUNER coinciding with Artissima 2018, at Palazzo Capris, in the heart of Turin.
This November, ARTUNER celebrates its 5th year anniversary with a group exhibition featuring works by Juan Antonio Olivares, Josh Kline, Caroline Walker, David Czupryn, Des Lawrence, and Pia Krajewski. We are taking this opportunity to look deeper into the zeitgeist of our epoch through contemporary artists’ responses to the age-old genre of portraiture.
The body as representation is constantly questioned as a site of meaning and resistance: in today’s portraits, it is often deconstructed, or cast against a surrealist backdrop, or it melts into oneiric and fundamentally uncanny shapes. While contemporary daily life is unquestionably dominated by myriads of body images – from billboards, to social media, to television – which flicker past leaving indelible and yet invisible traces in our minds, artists push us to look for longer, questioning the symbols of power and submission embedded in our visual vocabulary.
The potency of daily life – with its joys and challenges, but, most of all, its resilience – is often addressed in these works; indeed, the artists have found their subject matter not in ideals, but in “observable, human reality”. As Dushko Petrovich writes for The New York Times: “in a time of chaos, there could be nothing more necessary – more defiant – than simply showing life as it’s being lived.”
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Much with the same intensity as we are projecting ourselves on thousands of multifaceted literal as well as metaphorical screens, we are also ceaselessly searching for other means of expanding our own existence. As Juan Antonio Olivares explores in his new immersive 5-channel sound installation, we seem to be accompanied in this quest by a divine guiding spirit: love. Evolving out of a 2017 installation work featuring a lone cassis madascariensis shell complaining of its solitude in the universe, how it hasn’t found intelligent life in its search, the Turin work will present a chorus of shells, drawing the viewer into their musings about the ultimate meaning of life. Juan Antonio Olivares (b. 1988) originally from Bayamón (Puerto Rico), studied between USA and Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. He exhibited in several galleries in the USA and Europe, including Jan Mot (Brussels), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), which this summer held his first major institutional solo show titled “Moléculas”. The artist lives and works in New York.
