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9/3/2004

Maurizio Cannavacciuolo

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

TV DINNER

Contemporary Italian Artist Maurizio Cannavacciuolo Presents a Wall Drawing Exhibition at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

BOSTON, FEBRUARY 4 2004 - The art of wall drawing is explored at Boston s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum this spring and summer with a contemporary exhibition by Italian artist and the Gardner s 45th Artist-in-Residence Maurizio Cannavacciuolo. The exhibition, entitled TV Dinner, includes two elaborate and intricate pencil wall drawings, as well an additional work in copper and Mrs. Gardner s Cuban travel journal. Hidden by a juxtaposition of primary colors, Cannavacciuolo s wall drawings at first elude, then challenge, the viewer to proactively look and engage in the work. The exhibition is one of a pair of final Centennial exhibitions on view in the final months of the Centennial celebration, through August 2004. Maurizio Cannavacciuolo is an artist, who, like Mrs. Gardner, creates installations that invite visitors to explore and engage in their richness of detail and complexity, says Anne Hawley, Norma Jean Calderwood Director. TV Dinner continues the Museum s commitment to living artists and offers, once again, a contemporary perspective on the Centennial celebration by allowing an artist to engage freely with the collection and the Museum gallery walls. TV Dinner opens to the public on Wednesday, March 10, 2004 and extends through August 15th. The exhibition is curated by Curator of Contemporary Art Pieranna Cavalchini and is Maurizio Cannavacciuolo s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. TV Dinner is also the first exhibition of its kind at the Gardner Museum, literally providing visitors with a window into the creative process throughout its installation. The incredible detailed and layered drawing will take Cannavacciuolo nearly a month, working 9:00 a.m. 5:00 p.m. daily throughout February to complete. Cannavacciuolo s call to visitors begins even before the exhibition opens. A literal window made of plexiglass and cut from a temporary door leading into the gallery provides a rare glimpse into the creative process. Throughout the month of February, visitors can see Cannavacciuolo (and a team of assistants) at work. This is the first time a Gardner Museum Artist-in-Residence has afforded visitors a behind-the-scenes look into the process of his work. The title TV Dinner is a challenge, a gauntlet tossed at the audience's feet by the artist TV dinners are compartmentalized, pre-packaged meals, consumed in front of a television, which flickers with its own menu of distracting colors and images, says artist Maurizio Cannavacciuiolo. TV dinners negate conversation, engagement and thought. Art can, similarly, be compartmentalized and reduced; labels provide prescribed explanations about a work of art and the meaning of all its parts, resulting in a tasteless experience that leaves visitors unengaged and unchallenged. TV Dinner contradicts these ideas; it is a call to look and to engage. The absurdity of the title also reflects Cannavacciuolo s sense of humor. TV Dinner is presented in the first-floor Special Exhibition Gallery and runs concurrently with Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner & the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (April 21 August 15), an international loan exhibition and final of the museum s Centennial celebration. This is the first time the Gardner has presented two exhibitions concurrently.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Cannavacciuolo regularly uses wall surfaces as a canvas to create monumental drawings. Though the actual pictorial process is left in part to chance he actively cultivates an element of randomness his drawings are deeply imaginative, full of hidden narratives, mutable and fragmented meanings, and personal myth. TV Dinner includes two floor-to-ceiling linear wall drawings containing allusions to the artist s personal odyssey, as well as many elements from the Gardner s permanent collection, building and archives. Applied in pencil, the drawings nearly disappear against the stark white walls on which they are drawn. This elusiveness is intentionally heightened by placing the works in profile to the adjacent walls in bold primary colors. TV Dinner conveys a veil of austerity that is at once deceptive, elusive and engaging, says artist Maurizio Cannavacciuolo. The linear complexities of the drawings seek to draw viewers in, inviting them to trace the contours of the lines in order to decipher the complete narrative and meaning. Yet, the work also eludes them, requiring proactive participation in the discovery, exploration and ultimate understanding of a contemporary project. It is this necessity for action and engagement in the work that I am hoping to evoke. Cannavacciuolo wants the viewer to actively participate in the discovery and exploration of his work, says Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art. He challenges the viewer to look beyond the obvious to discover and decipher the work s intricacy, complex narratives and personal myth. The physical and aesthetic richness of detail in the exhibition s central wall drawings mirrors the fullness of Mrs. Gardner s own installation. In creating the Gardner Museum 101 years ago, Mrs. Gardner sought to empower viewers to personally seek out, explore and engage with great art. She installed her collection with very little guidance for the visitor. It was to be a visual and intuitive journey, adds Cavalchini. Even today, visitors often overlook some of her favorite treasures a rare book tucked away on a shelf, an ornate candelabra, a discrete architectural element in the shadow of more recognizable work. Yet, this is the magic of the Gardner; there is always something new to see, some elusive object or installation to discover. So has Maurizio set the stage for a visual odyssey in TV Dinner. Upon approaching the gallery space, visitors will encounter a case located outside the room and containing two objects: a painting on copper made by the artist during his residency at the Gardner Museum in October 2003; and a travel journal compiled by Mrs. Gardner on an 1886 trip to Cuba. An avid traveler and a lover of cultures, Mrs. Gardner kept elaborate and beautiful travel journals, with notes about the people, places and cultures she encountered. She often pasted in images, postcards, even pressed leaves and flowers into the pages, thus creating a rich visual narrative of her experiences. In the Special Exhibition Gallery, visitors can seek out details from these pages in Cannavacciuolo s work.

MAURIZIO CANNAVACCIUOLO
Maurizio Cannavacciuolo is originally from Naples Italy. This ancient city has been bedrock for artists for thousands of years. Rich in historically diverse cultures it has given the artist his multiple fields of reference and spawned his stylistic diversity. The artist s elaborate and often promiscuous wall drawings are filled with patterns, images and writings borrowed from many sources. Part painter, part architect, part philosopher and part writer, Cannavacciuolo is a critical observer blessed with an acute sense of the ridiculous and the absurd. Cannavacciuolo is the Gardner Museum s 45th Artist-in-Residence and first of an unprecedented five visiting contemporary artists in 2004. He has presented solo exhibitions throughout Europe and South America including: the Museu da Republica, Galeria Catete, Rio de Janeiro (2002); Fundacion Ludwig de Cuba (1997), La Habana; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roof-garden, Rome (1995); and Museum Puri Likisan, Ubud, Bali (1989). TV Dinner is Cannavacciuolo s first solo U.S. museum exhibition.

ACCOMPANYING PROGRAMMING & EXHIBITIONS
A series of evening and free daytime lectures, as well as a 96-page artist s book (Edizioni Charta), are presented in conjunction with TV Dinner. The book with include an introduction by Norma Jean Calderwood Director Anne Hawley and essays by curator Pieranna Cavalchini and Marcia E. Vetrocq, an art historian and critic who has written extensively about Italian art and has been a senior editor at Art in America since 1998. Presented concurrently is the final exhibition of the Centennial celebration, an international loan exhibition entitled Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner & the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (April 21-August 15; times tickets and an additional fee required). Gondola Days explores Mrs. Gardner s early inspirations and affiliations with important artists, writers and thinkers in turn-of-the-century Venice and is presented in the Museum s 4th floor offices, a space built as Mrs. Gardner s private apartment and never before open to the public. This season also marks the final months of a pair of contemporary Centennial exhibitions: Joseph Kosuth s Centennial neon Whistler s Warning (c.c.c.c.c.), illuminating the museum s exterior wall; and Elaine Reichek s virtual madam i m adam, both on view through August 2004.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
280 The Fenway
Boston, MA 02115

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