Alessandro Pessoli “Against Me”
Anton Kern Gallery
This event has ended.
In his sixth solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, Italian-born and Los Angeles-based artist Alessandro Pessoli presents Against Me: new paintings, ceramics, and sculptural installations that include self-portraits, references to traditions of Italian painting, and even handmade bows and arrows. In addition to the main exhibition, the artist will create his own version of an Italian trattoria—Sandrino—on the gallery’s third floor, complete with an espresso bar.
In 2016, Pessoli found himself unable to create new work. For the artist, the sense of urgency to make a painting or sculpture had disappeared, and, never one to go through the motions of working in the studio simply out of habit, he found himself confronting a void and lack of purpose in his daily life. However, he found joy in practicing archery and crafting bows, arrows, and targets in his backyard. The daily ritual of molding wood and bone nocks, filing, cutting, and straightening bamboo, became akin to his daily artistic rituals, but with a different purpose. Balancing an arrow was similar to creating a sculpture. Painting the bows used the same creative impulses as laying paint on a canvas. But he spent the evenings wondering what he was doing, and why, and felt a sense of guilt for not making work in the studio.
This difficult time period became the fuel for Against Me, a way to push back against himself and turn 2016, this year of inactivity, into a flourish of creativity. Vibrant self-portraits feature various elements of his everyday life: wine bottles, the lizards that live in his backyard, his shoes, various tools, and text such as “Fuck You Alessandro.” The bright colors of Los Angeles (the city he has most recently called home) mix with his Italian past: in one painting, the artist takes Scipione’s Uomini che si voltano (1930), one of the first paintings from childhood that he remembers seeing in a book, and transforms it into a neon-imbued landscape where his own image is found in the two men who turn around. And yet, for all of these self-reflections, each work is instilled with a sense of the universal and contains a shared kinship of the human experience.
Media
Schedule
from October 12, 2017 to November 11, 2017
Opening Reception on 2017-10-12 from 18:00 to 20:00