DANIELLE VILLICANA D'ANNIBALE "COCKTAILS"

PRESS RELEASE
VIA CAVOUR 85 • AREZZO

EVENT:
Exhibit of painting

ARTIST / TITLE:
Danielle Villicana D’Annibale “Cocktails”

EXHIBIT DATES:
Friday, March 21 - Saturday, May 24, 2014

LOCATION:
Via Cavour 85 – 52100 Arezzo (AR), Italy Tel: +39 0575 23820 / Cell: +39 338 600 5593 Web: http://www.VillicanaDAnnibale.com Email: danielle@villicanadannibale.com

OPENING RECEPTION:
Friday, March 21, 2014, at 6:00pm
with the presence of the artist

INFO:
FREE ENTRANCE
by appointment
(closed Sunday & Monday)

ORGANIZATION:
Artist, Curator & Educator Danielle Villicana D’Annibale
Cell: +39 338 6005593 Email: danielle@villicanadannibale.com
Graphic Project Riccardo Terziani - Copy Service D/Sign (AR)

SPONSOR:
Villa Margherita a Paradise for Artists in Tuscany
___________________

PRESS RELEASE

Cocktails Danielle Villicana D’Annibale exhibits in Arezzo from March 21 to May 24, 2014

At Via Cavour 85 in Arezzo, on Friday, March 21, 2014 at 6PM, will be inaugurated the solo exhibition Cocktails of the Californian artist Danielle Villicana D’Annibale. The exposition will host a selection of approximately 30 recent works of art, all of which will be displayed for the first time in Arezzo. The solo exhibition presents the abstract path of the American artist in her past year of activity, a sort of “ready-made Dada Pop” which will remain visible, at free entrance, until Saturday, May 24, 2014, with the following hours: by appointment (closed Sunday & Monday).

Danielle Villicana D’Annibale is a vivacious and multifaceted personality. Musician, Thespian, art scholar, painter, sculptor, ceramist, scenografer, curator and gallerist, she prepared the exhibit inspired by thoughts about Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon. The artist presents a solo exhibition which transforms an expository event into a theatrical game, thanks to informal paintings in which dense material and the lacerated dialogue with the three-dimensionality of the packs of cigarettes and sugar, and with blisters and medicines, create a complex and distinct language. Three protagonists: full packets of sugar, empty medicine blister and empty packs of cigarettes. Objects which appear to be privy of value, which acquire new meanings. It deals with works with garish tones – explains the art critic Matilde Puleo, “… from the compositions now rigorously geometric now more decomposed that allow to race among the lines a lightness that would seem to be a criticism to the society of consumption, but that in reality, leaves space to the optimism … to give a name to the double sidedness of our convictions, always half the road between the paralyzing uncertainty and the conceitedness that we be the cunning one the moment.” Friends and enemies, comforts and fears, elixir of long life and mortal poisons. Do we need all this sugar? And these medicines do they really save our lives? Does smoke give us peace and serenity? Thanks to them can we live happily and contented?

These and other queries that Danielle Villicana D’Annibale lances with an eccentric exhibit, which art critic Francesco Giulio Farachi affirms, “… with festive track, it enters from the eyes, it lacerates the veils of our disenchantment, it removes from us the reassuring mask of the spectator and it conducts us in the theater of our days for it stuffed to find again to the center of a prepared stage where we always meet
our fears, our sloth, our drugged joy, our unawareness and our reason. The discovery, still aesthetic, but not anymore ecstatic, of the world that we do.”

Words written about the artist:
“…the artistic activity of Danielle Villicana cannot be delimited, really because the artist expresses an omnivorous wish to embrace styles, movements, languages, techniques and media, but that converges in a solo great project, never to stand still, to overcome continuously the limits to conduct new cognitive experiences which is the deepest sense of the art. Probably we could perhaps suggest a path that, keeping in mind of the developed solicitations and seductions, sees Danielle Villicana depart from the solid construction and concreteness of the "profession" of the artist, travelling through the history of the art to also lay claim to the fresco, and to gradually arrive to undress some classical and figurative baggage, to access abstract art and to the informal one, to land to the object art, to the combine painting of Rauschenberg, to finally find again an expressive liberty that conjugates life and art.” Michele Loffredo, art critic and historian

“…Scenographer, painter, gallerist, sculptress, ceramicist and thespian, Danielle incarnates the American spirit, intending this, as writes Loffredo, her cultural formation launched at Laguna Beach, carried on in Los Angeles and completed in Florence. The entire artistic experience of Danielle is documented in the Aretine exhibit entitled <> and in which is proposed academic interest in American pop art and the denunciations with regards to the commercialization of cigarettes, thus the last series entitled <> chromatically strong images, unlimited and expression of doing abstract which has no limits …” Liletta Fornasari, art historian

Brief biography:
Danielle Villicana D’Annibale was born in San Francisco, in California, in 1972. In 1994 she graduated in Art History and the Visual Arts with a B.A. from Occidental College of Los Angeles. The love for the Renaissance took her to Italy in the same year, where she attended important masters and Florentine atelier, from Charles Cecil Studios to the Florence Academy, to the studio of Silvestro Pistolesi in 1996. Afterwards she learned the technique of fresco at the school of Leonetto Tintori of Prato. In 2001 she enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti of Rome. She continued on the meantime her plastic and pictorial research, veering towards abstraction: the series Cigarette Box Paintings took life. With the academic diploma obtained in 2006, the American transferred to Arezzo, where she may live in close contact with the art of Piero della Francesca. Collaborating with her husband Maurizio D’Annibale, light designer, Danielle Villicana began working on the project Villa Margherita a Paradise for Artists in Tuscany and opened, in 2010, a contemporary art gallery in the heart of the city, immediately becoming a favored meeting place for Italian and foreign artists. Since 1994 she has participated in solo and group exhibits in Italy and the United States. She is a member of the California Art Club and co-founder with her husband, Maurizio D'Annibale, of the "Villa Margherita International Art Club."

Principle professional activities:
In 1993, Danielle Villicana D’Annibale conducted the role of assistant to Eugenia Butler for the project The Kitchen Table Project presented at ART/LA'93, where artists of the caliber of Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneemann, Felipe Ehrenberg and other thirty figures of international level were present. From 1998 to 2000 she was sculptress for Treadway Industries in the environment of projects including the Venetian Hotel & Casino, Aladdin Gaming, Universal Studios Japan, Disney California Adventure and
others. In 1999, she conducted the task of painter and decorator for Saltman Art in Burbank Los Angeles and the Venetian Hotel & Casino. In 2003, she was assistant scenografer to Francesco Frigeri, at Cinecittà, for the film The Passion of the Christ of Mel Gibson. From 2010 to today she has curated and organized over sixty exhibits, concerts and literary encounters inside the Villicana D’Annibale Galleria D’Arte and the new alternative exhibition space Via Cavour 85 of Arezzo.
___________________

VILLA MARGHERITA A PARADISE FOR ARTISTS IN TUSCANY ART GALLERY • INTERNATIONAL ART CLUB • ART WORKSHOPS + ENGLISH
The Villicana D’Annibale Art Gallery believes in the importance of promoting contemporary art. Be a part of contemporary art…it’s simple and fun!

The sponsor of the initiative is Villa Margherita a Paradise for Artists in Tuscany, a project created by Danielle Villicana D’Annibale, artist and gallerist. The Californian has a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and the Visual Arts from the United States, a diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (Accademia di Belle Arti Roma) and obtains a Tefl diploma for Teaching English as a Second Language. At Villa Margherita, Danielle offers courses in drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, sculpture and English. All are welcome to visit and discover our creative world, full of flowers and Tuscan colors, immersed in the nature of Alpe di Poti. Join the Villa Margherita International Art Club, membership is free! More information is available on our website http://www.villicanadannibale.com or by calling Danielle directly at +39 338 6005593.