Fulvia Mendini / Andy Rementer / Little Circus – Erika Nordqvist

Mostra doppia personale di Andy Rementer e Fulvia Mendini dal titolo The Age of Innocence. E consueto appuntamento con Little Circus: protagonista Erika Nordqvist.

Comunicato stampa

Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is proud to present The Age Of Innocence, the double personal exhibition of the artists Fulvia Mendini and Andy Rementer, joined together by a linear and synthetic painting that combines the taste for illustration with a series of references to the history of art. In fact, both have developed a style characterized by a polished formal simplification and the use of a bright color palette, reminiscent of illustrated children's stories, that evokes the memory of a lost innocence.
American, native of New Jersey, Andy Rementer studied graphic design at the University Of The Arts in Philadelphia and worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for newspapers such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Apartamento Magazine and Creative Review, while, as an animator, he collaborated with the broadcasting company MTV and the film studio Warner Bros. He has worked for two years in Treviso at Fabrica, the Benetton Group's communications research center, along with a handful of international researchers specialized in graphic design, photography, video, music and journalism. During his two-year stay in Italy, the artist has developed a peculiar visual language inspired not only by design, comics and cartoons, but also by European art, from Romanesque art to the twentieth-century magical realism. In Rementer's works, the urban landscape is the backdrop for a series of quick tales, ordinary stories that, however, reveal the extraordinary nature of the everyday experience.
After studying graphic design and Illustration at the European Institute Of Design in Milan, Fulvia Mendini worked at the Atelier Mendini and, in parallel, developed her own pictorial and decorative research, focusing in particular on the portrait and on the world of natural forms. A versatile artist, Mendini collaborated with artisans and companies, making potteries, sculptures, carpets, murals, jewelry and handbags. Her painting, characterized by a frontal and hieratic setting, filled with erudite citations, is the result of a refined mixture of graphic and artistic styles. If in her modern Madonne the influence of Renaissance painting – from Giovanni Bellini to Piero Della Francesca, from Pisanello to Paolo Uccello – is undeniable, in the most recent portraits, besides the obvious influence of Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist iconography, emerges, for the first time, the interest in the natural landscape, where the artist reinterprets the lesson of the Douanier Rousseau, positioning it in an Arcadian dimension populated by nymphs and fairies.
The Age Of Innocence compares Rementer's urban tales to Mendini's Edenic allegories, drawing attention to their shared graphic matrix, the terse tendency and the predilection for flat colors and bright hues. In fact, both artists build a hypothetical and sublimated world, dominated by geometry, where characters, objects and places, just like in Abbot's Flatlandia, pave the way to the discovery of additional, multiple dimensions. On show are about thirty works, including drawings, watercolors and paintings by Andy Rementer and acrylics on canvas, panel and paper by Fulvia Mendini.

FULVIA MENDINI was born in 1966 in Milan, where she lives and works.
After studying illustration and graphic design at the European Institute Of Design, she worked at the Atelier Mendini, collaborating with various companies. Later she developed her own pictorial and decorative research, focusing in particular on the portrait and on the natural world.
She exhibited her work at the Grand Palais in Paris; at the Taejon Expo International in Korea; at the Triennale Museum in Milan and at the galleries: Luis Adelantado in Valencia, Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea in Milan, San Salvatore in Modena, Delle Battaglie in Brescia, Angel Art in Milan, Spazio Etro in Milan, Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Roberta Lietti Arte Contemporanea in Como and Galleria Armory Arte in Perugia. In 2009 she took part in the Prague Biennale.
Chiara Canali, Lorenzo Canova, Mauro Corradini, Raffaella Guidobono, Fulvio Irace, Norma Mangione, Loredana Parmesani, Ivan Quaroni and Alessandro Riva wrote about her work.
She made potteries in Vietri, designed a collection of handbags for Yoox, and designs jewelry. She is in the permanent collection of the Byblos Art Hotel in Verona with some of her paintings and her mosaic works are installed in the stations of the new Naples subway designed by the Atelier Mendini.

ANDY REMENTER (USA, 1981. Lives and works in Philadephia) is an award winning Graphic Artist from USA. He grew up in a Victorian beach town where an early xposure to the sun faded, local signage educated his love of type and hand-painted lettering. A sense of timelessness and nostalgia permeate his visual world. Another reoccurring theme of Rementer’s work is isolation, something he cites as an effect of his abrupt relocation to an urban environment in formative years and often depicted in his work through his characters’ underlying unease. He graduated from The University of the Arts in 2004. After working with Fabrica in northern Italy, he relocated to the East Coast where he divides his time between drawing, painting, and storytelling. His colorful and vibrant work has been featured through a variety of sources including an ongoing collaboration with Apartamento Magazine, The New York Times, MTV, The New Yorker, Le Monde, New York Magazine and Creative Review. He has exhibited his art in solo and group shows throughout Europe, Usa and Asia.

The show will run until 2 April 2016

click here for italian version
in LITTLE CIRCUS:

ERIKA NORDQVIST
Monkey Riders
curated by Michela D’Acquisto

Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is proud to present in Little Circus, the gallery space dedicated to special projects, Monkey Riders, the first solo exhibition in Italy of Swedish artist Erika Nordqvist.
What animates the protagonists of Erika Nordqvist's drawings is the constant and ongoing research of their role in contemporary society. Depicted in domestic interiors, but also in libraries and museums, as well as in the middle of nature, her characters are caught in the attempt to carve out a space of their own in these places: they make decisions that they often regret, but it is impossible to go back and the consequences persist over time, as a testimony to a reflection as important, perhaps even more so, as the choice that it led to.
The medium favored by Nordqvist is well suited to translate on paper the steps of this process. At the beginning the pencil lines are just sketched, then they gain confidence, crisply marking the sheet. The artist does not bother to hide imperfections and stains, intentional or otherwise, she shuns perspective, unites environments that in reality could not coexist. Erasures, always visible, hint at every stage of the work, giving rise to an exceptional narrative ploy. Superimpositions and transparencies give new life and three-dimensionality to drawing, that, by virtue of its immediacy, offers an ideal means to accommodate confessions and memories.
Natural heir of artists such as Mamma Andersson and Klara Kristalova, Erika Nordqvist combines muted tones and Nordic rigor to a pronounced taste for magical realism and a lively irony, that, to paraphrase the title of the show, leads her to call herself a monkey rider: “after seeing, in the house of a usually very sensible middle-aged lady, several pictures showing a monkey riding a dog, this became my alter ego – a monkey rider, proud and completely mad”.
If at a first glance her drawings may seem personal, almost private, like an open window that allows to spy on the intimacy of others' lives, it soon becomes clear that the scenes portrayed belong to the collective unconscious and serve to explore human relationships: with the others, with the surrounding world, but above all with ourselves.

Born and raised on a farm in Sweden, Erika Nordqvist studied art in England, first at the Arts Institute in Bournemouth (BA Hons Fine Art) and then at Slade School Of Art in London (MFA Painting).
She currently lives and works in Sweden.

The show will run until 2 April 2016