Contact at Grey Art Gallery: Alyssa Plummer
New York City, August 22, 2005—Andrea Facco, a conceptually oriented painter living in Bologna, has created an installation in response to the Grey Art Gallery’s fall exhibition, Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500–1800. On view in the Grey’s lower level gallery from September 13 through December 3, Facco’s first American exhibition, Room with a View, explores the circulation of images in a visual culture completely inundated with them. One modest painting, entitled Room with a View, sparks the subsequent works, all of which are contained in it. In a curious reversal from the exhibition upstairs, where prints reproduce paintings, Facco, who was born in Verona in 1973, upsets conventional hierarchies that deem unique works to be of much greater value and importance than those created as multiples. His paintings have been executed in numbered editions, emphasizing how some images repeated endlessly—for example, those seen on TV, the Internet, print media, packaging, etc.—eventually and inevitably permeate our consciousness. Andrea Facco is only one of a number of enterprising artists who successfully demonstrate that the age-old medium of painting is still a highly viable and exciting one. “Like colleagues such as Mark Tansey and Ellen Gallagher, and, more recently, Damien Hirst, Facco investigates the relationship of painting and photography,” observes Lynn Gumpert, Grey Art Gallery director. “We’re very pleased to host the American debut of this intriguing, emerging Italian artist whose paintings merit greater attention in their own right but also so intelligently respond to the Paper Museums exhibition,” she continues. Facco’s often highly realistic works contain images derived from mass media and our contemporary visual culture. For example, his series entitled Zapping—Italian slang for channel surfing, that is, rapidly changing stations with a remote control—consists of paintings that reproduce images that he has digitally photographed while watching television during a specified time period. (See details on the right.) The variety of images suggests the hundreds of programs accessible to cable and satellite subscribers. Included in the series on view at the Grey Art Gallery are random snippets from a weather station, cartoons, sports events, pornographic films, news broadcasts, talk shows, etc. In a similar vein, Facco also often makes “stamps” that reproduce larger paintings by him. These not only refer to the current practices of postal systems in the U.S. and Europe of issuing stamps illustrating works by well-known painters, but confer upon this young artist a fictive validation bestowed on his more famous predecessors. Moreover, by fashioning such tiny, meticulous works, Facco invokes the miniature painting tradition of past centuries that not only demonstrated the creators’ skilled mastery but also predated photography in allowing images to be easily transported. Still another association is with the technique of trompe l’oeil, which invokes the origins of the medium of painting itself with the myth of the famous Greek painter who so realistically depicted grapes that birds tried eat them. Finally, Facco likewise riffs on paintings as commodities, substituting his own unique miniature reproductions for real stamps in order to send a postcard that pictures on its reverse side a photograph taken by Facco of his own hand painting the stamp. The postcards, which include the “cancelled” stamp, are exhibited alongside the paintings they reproduce. In this case, a unique painting is mistaken by postal officials for a multiple commodity. Andrea Facco is represented by Biagiotti Progetto Arte, a gallery based in Florence. Grey Art Gallery, New York University Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays: 11 am – 6 pm
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