Curated exhibitions

• Heavy In Whiteby Lynn Bianchi , 5 September 2017View exibition

  

  HEAVY IN WHITE
  
  Lynn Bianchi's renown collection Heavy In White has been shown in museums worldwide, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan; the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland; CICA Museum, South Korea; Musée Ken Damy, Brescia, Italy; 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada. Even though the collection was created in 1997-2001, it keeps getting mentions in press and winning prizes all over the world. Only this year, it won the first prize at The Photography Showcase Experiment Bio in Bilbao, Spain, a locus of encounter and exchange between artists to investigate in the field of photography, a showcase from which make visible the riskiest and newfangled artistic proposals.
  
  Heavy In White has also been featured in over forty publications, including this year's The Huffington Post- Arts & Culture. As Priscilla Frank wrote: “Spaghetti Eaters is a wonderfully body-positive photography series that proves the only way to enjoy carbs is sans clothing. In the silver gelatin prints, women of all shapes and sizes lounge lavishly while gorging on what I can only imagine is a heavenly mix of linguini, capellini, fettuccine and tagliatelle."
  
  Takashi Suzuki featured Heavy In White in the Japanese art and culture magazine TAlking Heads series and Hey! Revue d’Art, quarterly magazine did too, with an Interview by Anne & Julienne, Paris, France, all in 2016. Some of the other publications include the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture in the U.S., Vogue Italia and Zoom in Italy, Phot’Art International in France, and GEO in Germany and Love's Body Photography Book published by Tokyo Metropolitan Museum where Heavy In White images are featured alongside the work of such celebrated photographers as Robert Maplethorpe. The collection is also being noticed by such contemporary online art news websites as Artefuse.
  
  Bianchi’s work is part of numerous private collections across the globe, including Manfred Heiting’s and Edward Norton’s, as well as in museum collections including The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Biblioteque Nationale de France, Paris. Lynn has recently exhibited in New York City at the Armory Show at Salomon Arts Gallery, in a two-person show at One Art Space, in a two-person exhibition at Shchukin Gallery.

• Naturally Digitalby Julian Hicks Retouch, 8 April 2017View exibition

  Naturally Digital is a selection of work I’ve created since joining the Celeste Network. I joined three years ago and in that time I’ve had continuous encouragement with sincere interest and endless kindness from fellow photographers and artists.
  
  Our friendly community has totally inspired me to produce much more work than I ever have before.
  
  My work appears to be stronger and more fluent now. Personally, I feel so much happier having made a commitment to make creative images that can be easily shared on the Celeste Network.
  
  The digital photographs I take are enhanced with digital retouching and supplied as archival giclée prints.
  
  I capture images from my everyday life and select any stand out moments to build a story or an idea. The retouched image focus attention on the subject and in turn the subject hopefully appears lifted as if it’s been placed on a pedestal.
  
  Last year, I was lucky enough to have my photograph '7075' chosen as a Celeste Prize Finalist work in the 'Photography & Digital Graphics' section and was a joint runner up.
  
  I’ve recently been notified that an image I submitted to the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2017 has been shortlisted for the final round of judging in this years exhibition.

• Di copia in segnoby Lisa Cutrino, 14 February 2017View exibition

  

  The works in 'Di copia in segno' reveal the artist's appreciation for the use of carbon paper as support. Full sheets or small pieces of carbon paper are re-used just in time to avoid total loss of identity. Markings found on the sheets reveal the legacy of their use and testify to their value as an object, telling us of past actions in which it was involved. The object that initially has a secondary value suddenly becomes a work of art, no longer in the background, but a star at centre stage.
  
  Lisa Cutrino lives and studies in Bari, Italy, at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 2016, she was the winner of the Super-Young Prize, Celeste Prize 2016, 8th edition.

• On people, dogs, and castlesby Paul Beel , 23 December 2016View exibition

  

  BEEL'S works are fascinating because he overturns the academic approach to realism that postulates that one should start with a fully formed composition then meticulously render it. Instead, the american-in-exile chooses a more difficult path to painting; each work becomes a leap into uncharted territory of composition and content. Why would should he do this? It is because Beel is looking for a reality that is more than just what he observes. The artist explains: "I start with something I find beautiful and focus on that because I need too…we all need beauty, but I also find that beauty alone isn’t true enough to life. Life involves layers of ugly as well as beauty, and it involves the strange way our minds make connections between things that aren't necessarily connected, and it involves so, so much more. I want that 'more', and I know I won’t get closer to it by drawing a little line around 'less' and then coloring it in."
  
  DURING Paul Beel's 25 year career as a practicing artist he has gained a reputation as one of the most interesting contemporary figurative artist in Italy and abroad. Beel's work, which can generally be described as a meditation on the importance of beauty despite the often bleak world in which we may encounter it, has been widely published, exhibited and aquired. The artist has won the Premio Celeste Prize, the Travel Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Premio Bozzolo amongst other prizes. The Museum of Modern European Art in Barcelona has acquired several of his paintings for their permanent collection, and his work is included in important private collections including the Bennetton collection and the Tullman collection. His work has been reviewed in "Arte" magazine, "Poets and Artists", and published in numerous catalogs.
  

• Jetlag Paradiso & Bloody Seaby Alix Delmas, 23 November 2016View exibition

  FOR HER NEW SERIES of photographic work, Alix Delmas has chosen to exhibit online. Using the dimension of the online world – that is, one without territorial borders – for this exhibition is very important to the artist. ‘Jetlag Paradiso’ and ‘Bloody Sea’ are a vision of our troubled times of global warming, coastal erosion and our fear of invasion. These images invite you to view the world – the way it works and the stark realities it hurls at people – through a filter, in the subdued harmonies of colour, shade and night time.
  
  The landscape of Jetlag Paradiso seems manipulated, as if overwhelmed by an artificial visual effect. The exotic shore recalls those discovered by our explorer-ancestors, always in search of the new elsewhere, much the same as what is today offered to tourists. The purplish section - the cyanose - seems to bear the traces of a deluge. An erosion of the landscape of the interior is an erosion which is transferred to the image itself. From any point of view, this purple gelatin reveals the ordeal a coastline experiences holding its own against tornadoes. It is, above all, a metaphor on the fragility of the landscape and its physical and photographic degradation, as if the landscape itself had lost its clarity.
  
  Alix's ‘Bloody Sea’ resists a direct narrative, instead revealing eerie, red-tinged 'atmospheres'. We watch as they advance towards us, menacing, threatening our cosy lives set comfortably behind the ramparts. This is a spectral vision of the sea, the Mediterranean Sea, in which thousands of people so far have lost their lives attempting to cross from one shore to another. The sea itself speaks only of the sea. It is our imaginations which create the falsehood and fear - and this fear lies within us.
  
  The dimension of the online exhibition is not within the territory of any country; it is outside the dimensions of any territory.
  
  BIOGRAPHY
  Alix Delmas (France) born in Bayonne in 1962, lived in Dakar (Senegal) until she was 14 years old. She went off to study painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Delmas is a versatile, even protean, and fundamentally experimental artist.The photographic and video “mises en scene” that she constructs blend performance and sculpture, paint and light. These installations shake up our shared perceptions of interior places and exterior spaces.The sensation of going off-piste and the intrusive territories present in her work - surely derived from perceptions formed in her childhood as French and foreign, of both here and elsewhere – allow her to tackle the idea of the outside, the in-between, the beside, through visual arts, from a reversed or opposing position. Everything is ambiguous ; nothing is simply a symptom. She is never within one exclusive domain but, rather, accentuates porous boders, creating permeabilities from one domain to the next. She develops an aesthetic of the interval, of the in-between, that is less a matter of widening the space between objects than of apprehending the rich density of their possible connections. The world presented by Alix Delmas does not have a build-in Global Positioning System. Heterogeneous, it can be characterizied before all else as affective, social, erotic. Different worlds unfold, mingle, and merge with that curious quality their momentaly borders have of generating back and foth movements, in short a kind of transit. Thus nothing is defined, and nothing is definitive.

• Revival and Empty Spacesby Katerina Belkina, creArte Studio, 24 October 2016View exibition

  

  EARLY ON KATERINA BELKINA understood her exceptional talent to see the world through different eyes. Born in Samara, southeast of European Russia, she was brought up in a creative atmosphere by her mother, a visual artist. Her education as painter at the Art Academy and from 2000 at the school for Photography of Michael Musor in Samara gave her the tools to give vision to her ideas. Exhibitions of her sublime, mystic self-portraits followed in Moscow and Paris. In 2007, Katerina Belkina was nominated for the prestigious Kandinsky Prize in Moscow (comparable to Britain's Turner Prize). Her series of art photography include: Repast, Revival, Light & Heavy, Empty Spaces, Not a Man's World, Home Work, Paint. Katerina currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
  
  "Katerina Belkina first came to the public's attention in 2006 with her series Paint, in which the viewer perceives the works as being unique and at the same time part of an intimate game which is being simultaneously played out between artist and model. Katerina draws her inspiration for these twelve works from her favourite artists of the 19th and 20th centuries with whom she has struck a creative alliance, inspired by both painting as a creative technique and concept. She has also played the part of muse, putting herself in the dual position of model and as painter. She speaks of an almost erotic relationship where the physical and the spiritual converge. She considers these works to be an homage to the artists: I was gripped by an urge not so much to indiscriminately imitate the Masters, but rather to dive into their innermost cores, to experience what had driven them, what had inspired them. Before starting on any of the works, I studied them down to the last detail. It is a sort of gift from me to my favourite artists, is how she puts it herself. We can recognise a Picasso in his Blue period, spot a ballerina by Degas, bump into the Suprematism of Malevich and the mysterious jungle of Rousseau le Douanier, the unapproachableness of Frida Kahlo, or the cool seduction of Tamara de Lempicka. And Belkina herself can match the sensual submission and decorative beauty of Schiele and Klimt‘s models. We see again a profound conceptual engagement of artist and person; this is no superficial self-portrait. Recognition of the selected Masters is immediate and insistent, but on closer inspection there is no indication that Belkina has copied a specific painting by one of the Masters; in each case she has created a new image in which the style and the atmosphere of the artist are clearly on view. She has painted the works that demonstrate the pictorial style of the chosen Master BEFORE making the photographs. This leaves us in absolutely no doubt as to Katerina Belkina‘s background: trained as a painter, and now painting with her camera." Text by Marike van der Knaap, Art Historian.