The young artist, Chiara Smirne (Novara, 1980), after her personal show at Cortina Arte in Milan in 2013 and participation in numerous contests (winner of the ArtGallery 2013 Prize, Milan) and group shows in Italy and abroad (Lodi Biennial 2013-14), arrives with a personal show at Galerie Kuhn & Partner in Berlin, organized in collaboration with Cortina Arte, Milan.
It is in the crepuscular atmosphere that her imaginary urban landscapes: whether they are metropolises congested with billboards, piazzas and historic streets, glimpses with a brave photographic perspective of shops and facades of palaces, long boulevards lost in the darkness rather than in a background of skyscrapers, they all emanate sensations of bewilderment, mystery, apprehension. The sounds of the city seem to be off and the frenetic beat slows down. Of course the style and technique adopted by the artist contribute to creating this distorted reality: the clean defined lines, the areas of flat, uniform, cold and at times gloomy colours confer to the landscape a temporal transcendence that imprisons the sentiments and angst of metropolitan existence on the canvas. Existence, human life in which the presence and the breath are felt, but are often not seen, sometimes glimpsed or which take on forms recalling “man”, but which are not human.
Thus the urban landscapes of Chiara Smirne become symbols of memories of life, of existential awkwardness, mirrors of anxieties, full of apparent gratification but lacking sentiments and values, where a lost humanity is always present with appearances and absences.
Catalogue in German and Italian with texts by Stefano Cortina and Veronica Riva
In collaboration with Cortina Arte, Milan
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