If the first reaction while standing in front of the artworks installed in the elegant and vast space of Numeroventi - a precious venue for an Artist Residency in Florence - is to reach out and touch them, then the aim of SOFT SPOT is accomplished.
Related articles: Anastasia Pavlou - Marina Perez Simão at Pace Gallery - Laura Benetton between ratio and instinct, nature and rigor, free colors and restrained shapes
Opening next week at Palazzo Galli Tassi (Florence, Italy), SOFT SPOT is a group show featuring the works of three international artists: Amelia Briggs (USA, 1985), Mona Broschar (Germany, 1985) and Manon Steyaert (Belgium, UK, 1996). It will be a colorful, intense, and exciting experience.
For the very first time in Italy, Eve Leibe Gallery is presenting a new fresh and special project: Briggs, Broschar and Steyaert are sharing their aesthetics and energy for the first time together. Bright and iridescent colors, vivid materials and forms, different mediums, fluffy and puffy tools and installations, soft details, curved and sexy painted shapes, are displayed at Numeroventi, the XVI century Palazzo Galli Tassithat was transformed in Artist Residency.
Co-curated by Cecilia Monteleone and Selena Cerami, SOFT SPOT actualized an aesthetic and narrative research that focuses on a strong sense of non-transience of materials, ideas, everyday objects, and an ironic atmosphere that these artists unveil and give back to the public with very clear and personal perspectives and point of views.
As Mona Broschar stated in a lecture about her work, she is attracted by her “daily encounters” with reality, encounters “full of magic” that she collects as drawings in a diary. This is the reason why her paintings are soft and pleasant, “tasty” and “nice”, but, to a more attentive look, they can also appear cynical and “ugly”, “soft and solid”, “sexy and unsexy” at the same time. For sure a strong irony is tangible in each piece.
Ironic is also Amelia Briggs’ recognizable approach towards reality: her installations remind the observer of a jelly belly huge installation (discover all available works on Kooness). Each artwork is made for the eye and for the touch. While looking at her sculptures, all meticulously created with different materials, within a sharp contrast between the frame and the content, a comparison with the historical Bruno Munari’s tactile workshop series seems to be natural.
About the changing of perspective and perception of objects, colors and materials into a defined space, the work of Manon Steyaert is vivid, elegant, and colorful as well, but with a different approach. Her artworks enclose in fact an aesthetic and formal rigor that accompanies the audience to a sprinkled path inside Numeroventi.
Through SOFT SPOT, Eve Liebe Gallery represents a prolific and diverse narrative across mediums, methods and strong aesthetics that encourage learning and appreciation through these three artists playing together for the first time in Italy.
“Understanding what art is, is a (useless) concern of the adult. Understanding how you do it instead, is a genuine interest in the child.” Munari
