AMSTERDAM.- Annet Gelink Gallery announced When it's almost dark, Giorgio Andreotta Calò's first solo exhibition at the gallery.
The exhibition presents the project ΙΚΑΡΟΣ (ICARUS), originally developed during Andreotta Calò’s participation in Into Nature (Emmen, 2020). The project began as a medium-length film and evolved into a broader constellation of works, aiming to translate the poetic essence of the film into the specific grammar of the exhibition space.
The film Icarus (2021) was created after a visit to the former butterfly pavilion of the zoo in Emmen. After the zoo relocated, the pavilion also fell into disrepair. Just before its eventual demolition in 2021, Andreotta Calò created this film about one expert -, and one self-taught entomologists who reestablish a colony of moths within the building, in a final symbolic act before its destruction. In the abandoned garden, they go through a cycle of birth, flourishing, and destruction, inspired by Ovid’s myth of Icarus. Their contingent actions become manifestations of the myth, and the film, initially a document of a biological transformation, grows into a testament to the mythical narrative.
The labyrinthine installation of cages in the gallery mirrors the butterfly garden in the film and the structure designed by Daedalus in the myth. Branches and cocoons, micro-casted in silver and bronze, are animated by sudden births of moths, shifting the traditional concept of still life into that of living nature. Where the story of Icarus is personified by the entomologist and his pupil in the film, here Andreotta Calò draws a parallel between the tale and the moth.
Andreotta Calò's fascination with the symbiosis between nature and human creation is similarly reflected in the Pinna Nobilis series. Employing marine silk and lost wax in the bronze casting process, the sculpture is of a large shell of the species by the same name. For this exhibition, the artist has sewn cocoons of the Callosamia promethea (a silkmoth) onto the far end of the sculpture, using marine byssus to stitch the organic material to the molten metal.
Through a constellation of works that continually overturn the boundaries between human artefacts and biological manifestations, the exhibition aims to reactivate the mythical dimension of the narrative. When it's almost dark thus occupies a permanent state of becoming, in the suspense between day and night and the twilight of the imagination.
After studying sculpture at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts (IT) and at Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin (DE), Giorgio Andreotta Calò was assistant to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov between 2001 and 2007. He was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2009-11), Villa Arson in Nice (2012) and ISCP in New York (2013-14). He participated in the Venice Biennale in 2011 as part of the international exhibition and represented Italy in the National Pavilion in 2017. His work has also been shown in numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam and Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. As of 2020, he has created a permanent intervention for the Castello di AMA collection, Gaiole in Chianti, Siena, Italy. He lives and works in Venice, where he teaches sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts. Group exhibitions include: Fondazione Prada, Venice, Italy (2023); Lo schermo dell'arte, Florence, Italy (2022); Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy (2020); MAXXI, Rome (2020); 16th Quadriennale d'Arte, Rome (2016); High Line, New York (2016); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2014).
He was recently commissioned the new film Nebula by Fondazione In Between Art Film, currently on view at the Ospedaletto Complex, Venice, Italy.
In 2012 he won the Italian Prize for Contemporary Art promoted by the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Italian Council in 2017, the Plan for Contemporary Art with the Ministry of Culture in 2020, 2021 and 2023.
