Antonia Rodrian at Rolando Anselmi

Artist: Antonia Rodrian

Exhibition title: The Serpent Scenes

Venue: Rolando Anselmi, Rome, Italy

Date: June 23 – July 23, 2022

Photography: Sebastiano Luciano / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Rolando Anselmi, Berlin/Rome

Rolando Anselmi is pleased to announce The Serpent Scenes, Antonia Rodrian’s first solo exhibition in the Gallery Project Room in Rome.

In Antonia Rodrian’s work, objects act as artefacts, as everyday tools or archeological instruments, as group of collaborating characters and traces of human gestures. Their incessant movement invites the viewer to decipher the narrative more deeply and to wonder what has just happened or is about to happen, what kind of performance they are about to perform. There is no clear indication of where these scenes take place: rather, the canvas is transformed into a space of colour, where the pictorial materials contribute to construct the narrative of the gestures and the lively flow of the silhouettes.

The title of the exhibition, The Serpent Scenes, suggests the idea of the metamorphosis of a body coming to life. In fact, the paintings on display show metal objects and smooth organic structures in snake-like movements. Groups of sharp tools collectively try to grasp, observe, cut or peel the outer layer of something. The title also proposes a relationship between the different paintings, as if they were chapters of one mysterious coherent story, underlined by the stage-like character of the monochrome backgrounds and the recurring compositional elements.

Welcoming the viewer is Magnify, where a group of magnifying glasses frames what appear to be plant branches, moving creatures or other indistinct organic matter. The lenses do not help to fully decipher the scene, rather they merely cast shadows and reflections, in a game of bringing inanimate objects back to life. The Garden, where six hands perform an unidentified task: perhaps gardening, a medical exercise or a hairdresser’s cut. The hands clutch snake-like plants, twisting around their fingertips, while metal scissors work on their own. Safety hooks and greenish ropes are entangled in Tied to a Moment (Safety). The ropes are tied and knotted around four floating hooks, while something tries to pull them out of the pictorial space. In Peel it like a snake peelers (or knives) work the surfaces of three round floating objects. With a continuous movement, they peel off the blue-grey outer layer, allowing the purple colour of the inner layer to emerge. The exhibition concludes with Hook and unwind, where blue belts have given up their practical use, now floating in space, reduced to their sole materiality: soft blue waves of fabric.

Antonia Rodrian (1989, Essen, Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf. Recent solo exhibitions include: Baustelle Schaustelle (Essen, 2021), sonneundsolche (Düsseldorf, 2020),. Selected group exhibitions feature: Galerie Droste X KPM (Berlin, 2022); Gomo Artspace (Vienna, 2021); Bloom (Düsseldorf, 2021); Newchild Gallery (Antwerp, 2021); Ignatz Bubis Zentrum (Frankfurt, 2020); Bistro21 (Leipzig, 2020); Artist’s Studios (Tel Aviv, 2019); Neuer Kunstraum (Düsseldorf, 2019); Künstlerhaus Bethanien/Studio 101 (Berlin, 2018).