Personal Showcase II at Rolando Anselmi

Artists: A Kassen, Enrico Della Torre, Thomas Lawson, Jorge Peris, Antonia Rodrian, Ian Waelder

Exhibition title: Personal Showcase II

Venue: Rolando Anselmi, Rome, Italy (website here)

Date: January 24 – March 9, 2023

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

Rolando Anselmi is pleased to announce Personal Showcase II, the second chapter of the group exhibition that brings together some of the most relevant collaborations of the last decade. The exhibition features works by A Kassen (collab. since 2004, DK), Enrico Della Torre (b.1988, IT), Thomas Lawson (b. 1951, UK), Jorge Peris (b. 1969, ES), Antonia Rodrian (b. 1989, DE), Ian Waelder (b. 1993, ES).

Presenting different media, from painting, to sculpture and photography, Personal Showcase II exhibits the production of the six artists tracing the path they shared with the gallery by collaborating over the years.

Welcoming the views on the first floor are two works by Ian Waelder, which narrate imaginaries of private and intimate life. Handle with care and the large canvas Bare Hands nº554 (Scheinwerfereinstellung), in an almost confidential way, explore the memory and roots of the artist’s grandfather through fragments and traces. Waelder’s works are followed by Jorge Peris‘s sculpture, Esqueleto. The artist usually acts on space, investigating its possibility of alteration and metamorphosis. Through transformative interventions, the sculptor subverts materials in a desire to force their limits. Three works by the Danish collective A Kassen complete the upstairs installation: Mirror and the sculptures Pile of Clothes and Bronze painting (XII). With an obvious sense of humor, the four artists base their practice on performing acts of redefinition and recontextualization of everyday objects and materials. Proceeding downstairs are Enrico Della Torre‘s Untitled: in these works the artist questions the limits of pictorial space as well as the elements present and latent in the work. Through investigating the relationship between gesture and structure, he covers the canvas with different layers creating new compositional spaces of lines and light, shadows and silhouettes. Loaded with allegorical elements, Thomas Lawson‘s works Burn, Burn, Burn and Beaten to Death, as well as Shit Storm on the opposite wall, bear witness to the artist’s focus on the depiction of the human form. The works intimately explore bodies and their psychological depth in order to capture how they relate to their social environment. Concluding the exhibition are Antonia Rodrian‘s works, We might push and they might move, A knot and its shadow and The Build-Up. In her works, the lively flow of objects acts as an ecosystem of characters that collaborate to trace human gestures and simultaneously reshape the space of the canvas.