Giulia Ricci: Order/Disruption

About

Order/Disruption is an exciting exhibition of new work by the Italian artist Giulia Ricci, following her recent inclusion in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and Dexter Dalwood's Creekside Open Exhibition. Comprising drawings, installations and video work, this beautiful exhibition showcases the full range of Ricci's practice, revealing her to be a true emerging talent in London's contemporary art scene. Ricci is fascinated by patterns and their systems, which she explores through various repetitive processes - primarily drawing on paper, using ink pens and grids. She is interested in many different principles and aspects of science and mathematics, such as chaos theory and the correspondence between macro and micro patterns existing in the universe, yet her work is also intimately bound up with her personal background, experiences and cultural reference points. These include not only the famous mosaics of her home town of Ravenna, but also the rural patchwork of fields in the countryside of Emilia-Romagna in Italy where she grew up — what she calls ‘the man-made geometry of the landscape'. This tension between natural ‘disorder' and the eminently human need to impose structure is at the very heart of Ricci's practice. Her main influences include the artists Alighiero Boetti, Annie Albers and Agnes Martin. Order/Disruption comprises a body of work begun in 2009 with a specific interest in exploring disruptions occurring within ordered and symmetrical patterns. It started with her film Beads (order, disorder and symmetry) that shows Ricci's hands playing with two circular sets of tactile beads — one black and one white — in which slowly and rhythmically she creates patterns and disruptions with her finger tips. This subsequently led on to a series of drawings experimenting with the order and disorder of patterns using only triangular forms. Having utilised different colours within her work, these pieces find her returning to black and white imagery, using the most fundamental and minimalist form of expression — negative and positive. Whilst drawing continues to be Ricci's primary medium she is also very interested in site-specific work and will be recreating her imagery on the gallery's windows in a manner specifically designed to interact with the window's grid and with the drawings on the wall. Ricci has deliberately chosen the layout of the show to be sympathetic to the space in which it is housed — a Victorian domestic house converted into a modern yet intimate ‘white cube' gallery. An eagerly-anticipated solo exhibition, Order / Disruption encapsulates a body of work in Ricci's practice that has been marked by great success and recognition over the past two years, with exhibitions, publications and awards both in the UK and internationally. As an exciting new development of her work begins, this show represents an opportunity to explore once more the distinctive clarity and harmony that is the signature of Ricci's work. You can view her full portfolio at: http://www.giuliaricci.eu/img/portfolio-Giulia-Ricci-en.pdf www.giuliaricci.blogspot.com