Artist: Mark Handforth
Exhibition title: Analog Spring
Venue: Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, Italy
Date: April 13 – June 17, 2017
Photography: Roberto Apa, images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise
Mark Handforth’s upcoming exhibition at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis centers around a new work, Panda Disponibile, the carcass of a FIAT Panda, covered with lighted candles, dripping wax. Set in the context of the deconsecrated 8th century church, the work evokes an altarpiece to discarded industry. The Panda’s still-working headlamps illuminate the church along with the flickering glow of the candles, suggesting a symbiosis between the romantic and the mechanical while presenting a gentle threat, a ghost of the vehicle’s original life as a gasoline-powered machine now covered in tiny flames. These melting candles become prayers to the angels of history, as we peer into a dark and uncertain future.
In addition to the work on view, the artist will be presenting a solo exhibition of new sculptures and wall works at Galleria Franco Noero in Turin in May 2017.
Mark Handforth (born 1969 in Hong Kong) grew up in London and currently lives and works in Miami. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Selected solo exhibitions include SMOKE, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy (2016); Sidewalk Island, Governor’s Island, New York (2014); Rolling Stop, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2012); Chicago Plaza Project, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011); Hessel Museum of Art, at Bard College, New York (2011); Kunstnernes Hus (with Urs Fischer and Georg Herold), Oslo, Norway (2009); Concentration 51, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2007); Kunsthaus, Zurich (2005); Le Consortium, Dijon (2003); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002).
