Artuner – Through the Looking Glass

Mostra collettiva di Artuner durante Artissima.

Comunicato stampa

“With the word ‘magic’, as opposed to ‘mystic’, I wished to indicate that the mystery does not descend to
the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it.”
- Franz Roh, 1925

Within the historical surroundings of 17th-century Palazzo Capris, ARTUNER is delighted to present its third Artissima Week event at the venue: Through the Looking Glass, a group exhibition featuring paintings by contemporary artists Manuele Cerutti, David Czupryn, Patrizio Di Massimo, Ana Elisa Egreja, and Katja Seib.

Magical Realism is arguably one of the most fascinating movements in the art and literature of the 20th century. Evocative and subversive, many artists and writers were attracted to it as a means of expression. As a movement, its definition has proved ever-changing and open- ended and, as a result, it still bears relevance today.

The term Magical Realism was originally coined by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe a new wave of Post-Expressionist painting. According to Roh, Magical Realism is characterised by accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity and the portrayal of the ‘magical’ nature of the rational world. The movement reflects the uncanniness of our modern technological environment, looking at the mundane through a hyper-realistic, yet often mysterious, lens.

Roh wrote: “We recognise the world, although we look on it with new eyes. We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world, that celebrates the mundane… It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquillity of simple and ingenuous things… it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world.”

The five artists included in this exhibition work predominantly with the medium of figurative painting and share some of the characteristics outlined by Roh. Like at the start of the twentieth century, artists today are faced with the challenge of making sense of a rapidly changing world, increasingly dominated by technologies that most of us do not fully comprehend. Such dichotomy triggers a feeling of estrangement which, in the work of these artists, sets the scene for mysterious, uncanny situations; often mundane but, at the same time, magical.