Artists

Groupshow

Press release

Galleria Franco Noero is pleased to present LE PALME, a group exhibition in the spaces of via Mottalciata, bringing together works of art and design from the late 1960s to the present around a single subject: the palm tree. The idea for the exhibition stems from a small 1979 watercolour by David Weiss, kindly lent by the artist’s Estate, in which an island of palm trees on a yellow ground is mirrored in the water until it becomes an almost abstract sign. This work holds, in nuce, the entire exhibition: the palm as a cliché of the exotic, as an image that doubles itself, as nature turned into representation. The show moves within the ambiguity of the palm, which in its physical presence carries the imagination towards distant shores, to the elsewhere of travel, and at the same time, reduced to an icon, draws close to everyday life, a familiar presence on product packaging or printed shirts. The exhibition brings together artists who, across different eras and contexts, have engaged with the same subject, at times drawing on its ancestral meanings, from the ancient world and the biblical tradition, at times reinterpreting it in light of the profound iconographic evolution it has undergone, from Tropicalism to New Age doctrines. The works on view come together to shape an Oriental garden: an exotic palm grove that is at once a spiritual one, a place of contemplation as much as of wonder. The palm thus becomes a shifting figure, open to ever-changing forms, meanings and readings, unfolding a range of perspectives in which works, languages and sensibilities meet in a quiet and fertile dialogue. Across generations, geographies and languages, LE PALME restores to a seemingly obvious form its capacity to surprise.