Artists

Bruce Nauman, Christopher Wool, Wilhelm Sasnal, Alexander Calder, Germaine Richier, Keith Haring, René Magritte, Elizabeth Peyton, Dadamaino, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Michel Basquiat, Bob Carlos Clarke, Joe Goode, Mike Kelly, Richard Pettibone, Sterling Ruby, Tatiana Trouvé

Press release

Vedovi Gallery is pleased to present SILENT DARK, a group exhibition that explores the interplay between values of light and shadow. Here, an absence of colour shapes the rich breadth of artists, bringing together Jean Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Bob Carlos Clarke, Dadamaino, Joe Goode, Keith Haring, Mike Kelly, René Magritte, Bruce Nauman, Richard Pettibone, Elizabeth Peyton, Germaine Richer, Sterling Ruby, Wilhelm Sasnal, Tatiana Trouvé, Christopher Wool, and Ossip Zadkine. This achromatic survey invites viewers to navigate the scale and depth of black and white through painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. SILENT DARK examines how darkness and lightness function as both artistic material and conceptual metaphor, investigating how such dimensions become realized through the body as an immediate territory of conflict. L'Echiquier (petit) (1955), a dramatic bronze by Germaine Richier, utilizes the figure as a metamorphic tension between human and animal forms. While Richier's sculptures evoke the bodies reformed by the traumas of war, Mike Kelly's Tree Spirits (from the Parasite Lily) (1979) renders a forest as an equal casualty—an apt critique of humanity's ongoing appetite for its own destruction. Ossip Zadkine's Hercules and the Hydra (1943) illustrates how mythological imaginaries become acute parables for real world conflict. Created in response to the fascist regime of its time, this work finds renewed prescience amidst increasingly volatile political landscapes. Similarly, Untitled (1982), a drawing by Jean Michel Basquiat, punctuates with a raw degree of bodily protest; a gloved black hand evokes the raised, black-gloved fists of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics, an iconic gesture of resistance in the fight for equality. Darkness maintains a generative power to illuminate the human imagination. Sterling Ruby's monumental canvas SP140 (2010), built up from gestural layers of spray paint that evoke urban languages of demarcation, quoting the aesthetics of gang tagging and its municipal removal. Its undulating field blurs abstract expressionism with vandalism as an existential play between the beauty and fragility of existence. Conversely, the iconography of Christopher Wool's Untitled (1990) distills a similar language with the technique of stamping. The Wool merges printmaking and mark making together by asserting the artist's presence through a singular, forceful gesture. Richard Pettibone's Andy Warhol - Most Wanted Man #2 1963 - John Victor G. #1 (2002) exemplifies the artist's own reinterpretations of canonical artworks, an equal act of compression; however, here Pettibone transforms the history of violence inherent to Warhol's police mugshots into precise, intimate formats. It is out of shadow where luminosity emerges. In La Magie blanche (Portrait de Paul Eluard) (1936) René Magritte depicts the poet writing upon the female body, an act of reinscribing poetry onto the surfaces of historical inspiration as a process of reanimation. Wilhelm Sasnal's Painting on the move Perry Farrel (2002) reimagines portraiture as a space for projection and reinvention. Where Bruce Nauman's Untitled (1993) suggests the sensitivity of touch as an artistic means of tactile reconnection with form, Bob Carlos Clarke's photograph The agony and the ecstasy (1994) envisions this sensuality through the amorous tension of a lover's embrace. Keith Haring's Hommage à René Magritte (1989) introduces a note of levity, bridging surrealism with pop through a future-looking artistic dialogue. As a peace offering, Alexander Calder's exquisite mobile Untitled (1952) presents an olive branch. Set in dialogue with Joe Goode's graphite rendering of clouds of Untitled (1971), Calder's formal fragility describes a bird in flight, presenting a combined symbol of hope that reaches outwards beyond the scope of darkness.