Zilberman Gallery will host Antonio Cosentino’s solo exhibition “boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, ferâre, my love” from Wednesday 18 May through Saturday 2 July.
From the organizer:
Antonio Cosentino is one of the 3 founders of the artist initiative Hafriyat, which was founded in 1996 and became highly influential in Istanbul’s art scene in the 2000s. In Cosentino’s paintings, one finds a wealth of images distilled from everyday life, the depths of personal memory, and the visual culture of the artist’s city, which the artist uses in his photographs, paintings and sculptures. The artist continues this tradition through different materials in his
exhibition at the gallery, creating an atlas of today’s Turkey.
Ferâre, a tin car that can be read as a continuation of the sculptures playing a central role in the artist’s practice, is at the core of this exhibition. Cosentino is influenced by the ability of tin to be recycled and reused, an industrially nonconsumable material. He uses this material from design to production to portray humorously his process that is reminiscent of that of a craftsman who works alone. Through a tin car, he reveals the accepted relationship between
waste and value from an ironically charged, novel perspective.
Just like the collective nature of our personal memory, the whole exhibition shows modes of remembering. Irony is replaced by heaviness in the portraits of Masist Gül where Gül’s facial expressions are full of terror. The reproductions of various portraits from Masist Gül’s hand-drawn comics from the 1980s are reminiscent of the trauma and violence that Masist, who was Armenian and was from Adana, used in his comics as a method of self-healing.
The series of paintings are reflections of the complicated projections of the environmental and urban architecture. The coldness of marble and its nothingness refer to psychological layers, while constructing an inventory of states of mind. Within this context, Masist’s overflowing desperation, efforts; the car’s absurd warmth; the other works’ “shabbiness, nostalgia, shifting rhythm” (in the artist’s words) in the exhibition “boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, ferâre, my love” converge to produce an “intuitive perception” rather than a “lofty narrative.”
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For more information, visit the official gallery page.
Tuesday – Friday / 11:00 – 19:30
Saturday / 12:00 – 19:00
zilberman@galerizilberman.com
+90 212 251 1214
Featured Image Source – Ferâre, Tin and auto tires, 230x70x90cm (2015)(Press Release)
İstiklal Cad. Mısır Apt. No:163 K.3 D.10 – Beyoğlu 34433
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