Scivias

About

Newly renovated Lisi Hämmerle Gallery is pleased to announce its re-opening on March 15, 2019 with Scivias, this season’s first exhibition.

This show, a look inside the research of Valentina D'Amaro, Debora Hirsch and Devis Venturelli, stems from a project that reflects a convergence of interests and visions through a metaphysical conception of art as a tool for exploring reality that transcends reason and conceptual thinking. 

"Scivias" is an experiment in which the unstable boundaries between intuition, an immediate knowledge, and science are exposed. The intuitive challenge that painting and moving images present is essentially elusive, demonstrating the dynamism of matter that becomes energy: the artists expose hollow-made matter which exists despite its appearance, thus revealing a world hidden beyond the senses in which everything is both vibrant and interconnected.

Valentina D'Amaro’s landscapes are the visual depiction of something beyond language, perceptible but untranslatable, as happens with music. Her research could be interpreted as non-conceptual and beyond logic and experience. D'Amaro looks behind narration and rationality, remaining open to intuition and giving the work the atmosphere of a widespread sense of suspension for the unexpected.

In Firmamento, Debora Hirsch aims to reach a balanced coexistence for seemingly disconnected worlds, in order to draw attention to hidden realities, to subtle interconnections and similarities. In trying to restore the complexity of the real, she draws on multiple references after a research on apparently unrelated worlds. This results in images that find their meaning at the end of an engineered construction, unfolding in a selection of evocative architectural details, decoded artifacts hidden inside the digital language, symbolic decorative elements, historic colonialist imagery of the Americas and contemporary digital colonialism motifs.

The "Sculpt the Motion" project by Devis Venturelli carries out continuous transformations of metallic bodies related to architecture, through the language of video and sculpture. The silvery layers of insulating material, activated by movement, become mobile sculptures that evoke Boccioni's dinamismo futurista. The contrast between rigid architecture and fluid form, gives rise to real visions that refer to the concept of "urban ecstasy", the basis of Venturelli's research.

The title of the exhibition from the Latin "Scivias" (originally Sci Vias or know the ways) refers to the title of the eponymous medieval prophetic book by German mystic Hildegarde von Bingen (1098 - 1179).

The gallery installation consists of new paintings, videos and sculptures of recent production, most of which made specifically for the exhibition. 

Valentina D'Amaro lives and works in Milan and has exhibited in art institutions and museums including: 54th Venice Biennale; PAC, Milan; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Triennale, Milan; Palazzo della Permanente, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art in Lissone; Palazzo Parasi, Cannobio; Guang Dong Museum of Art, Canton, China; 2nd Prague Biennale, Prague; Hangart-7, Salzburg; Barbican Center, London; MARS, Milan. She is the winner of the 6th Cairo Communication Award (2005). In 2016 her work was included in "Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting" published by Phaidon.

Debora Hirsch, Italo-Brazilian artist, has been artist-in-residence at the AnnexB, NY (2019) and at the RU Residency Unlimited, NY (2018). She was appointed for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation's (CIFO) Grants and Commissions Program 2019-2020. She has exhibited in museums and institutions including MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Krakow; MARS, Milan; nGbK, Berlin; WhiteBox, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; MuBE, São Paulo; MACRO, Rome; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; MAGA, Gallarate; Quadriennale, Rome; P. della Ragione, Verona; MAXXI, Rome.

Devis Venturelli, multi-disciplinary artist based in Milan, has exhibited in museums and institutions including: 54th Venice Biennale; Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; PAC, Milan; Xinjiang Biennial, China; MACRO, Rome; Kulturhuset Museum, Stockholm; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; MMOMA, Moscow; Stadtgalerie, Kiel; Italian Institute of Culture, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle, Vienna; Center d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Fondazione Merz, Turin; MARS, Milan. He is the winner of the Aletti Prize (2008) and of the Video.IT-Merz Foundation Award (2010).