Marabini Gallery is delighted to present a new serie of works by the american artist Beverly Semmes. Roland Barthes wrote in his essay that “ The fashion system tends to ʻreciteʼ the garment rather than manifacture it ”, Beverly Semmes seems to take to the extreme this analysis. Her oversize clothes appear as actors without face in a drama in which they are looking for their lost identity, effigies of a contemporary society that is inclined to subjugate the individual through its stereotypes.

Fabric is the protagonist, giant clothes, out of scale, that flood of velvet and chiffon spaces that seem flowering plains or choppy lakes. Her works subvert the most classic sartorial convention, the dress becomes landscape, forest dense of trees, although the aesthetic pleasure makes way for a diffused anxiety, as if something dark is moving under these soft clouds.

The beauty, in this case, does not abdicate in favour of the meaning, although in the poetic language of the artist is always present a careful consideration on the social and cultural role of the contemporary woman, on the stereotypes and models imposed by fashion.

The reference to the out of scale of the everyday object belongs to Surrealism and Pop Art but also to the late Robert Morris' Minimalism. These works in their solemn bearing and majesty are the emblem of the massified person to whom remains, lastly, overindulge in appearing.

Beverly Semmes was born in Washington , lives and teaches in New York at New York University and Pratt Institute. Beverly Semmes is an internationally recognized artist who has been showing her work since 1990. In 1995 the artist designed costumes and sets for the French choreographer Mathilde Monnier in Montpellier, France. This collaborative production - titled “Nuit” - continues to tour worldwide today. She had numerous solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art ( Chicago, IL), the Hirshton Museum and sculpture Garden (Washington DC), the Virginia Museum of Art (Richmond, VA), the Whitney Museum Philip Morris Gallery, (New York, NY), and the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH). She exhibited large-scale projects in Japan in 1999 and in 2003. Semmesʼs work is in the permanent collections of many important museums such as the Albright Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY) the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), the Whitney Museum of American Art in (New York, NY), the Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO) and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, (Los Angeles, CA). She has completed three major commissioned works for public lobby spaces: an installation for Microsoft Corp. headquarters in Redmond, Wash., a large wall work for the Progressive Corp. in Mayfield Village, Ohio and a grand entry sculpture for Musachino Art University Library in Tokyo, Japan.

Galleria Marabini
Vicolo della Neve, 5
Bologna 40123 Italia
Ph. +39 051 6447482
chiara@galleriamarabini.it
www.galleriamarabini.it

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