FLORENCE, ITALY – The Uffizi Galleries are honored to announce contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s latest solo exhibition, Flora Commedia, opening on November 20, 2018. The exhibition is co-curated by Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, and Laura Donati, curator of the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Uffizi. Flora Commedia features in ten interlinked galleriesover sixty works of gunpowder paintingsthat vary in size, in addition to select artist sketches that illustrate the creative process. Yesterday, November 18, at 4pm on Piazzale Michelangelo, Cai Guo-Qiang ignited the daytime explosion event City of Flowers in the Sky, inspired by Botticelli’sRenaissance masterpiece Primaveraand overlooking the city of Florence, to splendidly unveil the exhibition.
Flora Commediawas born from a visit to the Uffizi Galleries in 2017, which included the Boboli Garden of the House of Medici, the Pitti Palace, the Prints and Drawings Department, and the Statues and Paintings Gallery. The artist uses flowers as a vessel to manifest the spirit of the Renaissance: its desires and pleasures, its connection with nature, the awakening of humanity and its new perception of the human body.
Flora Commediais a part of a broader multi-year exhibition project for Cai Guo-Qiang, An Individual’s Journey through Western Art History, which has arrived in Florence after the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Museo Nacional Del Prado in Madrid, and then in February 2019 will be at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, before ultimately returning to the East as a culminating presentation of this odyssey.
Involving different aspects of the artist’s creativity, the exhibition joins his outdoor daytime explosion event with the intimate moments of igniting gunpowder on canvas and paper. Cai’s technique, refined and complex, established a close exchange with Nature while juxtaposing with the masters of the past in the museum’s nearby rooms to trigger a dialogue with the surrounding art.
The first gallery—which is connected to the galleries of the Uffizi’s collections by late-Renaissance painter Caravaggio—presents four self-portraits, echoing the tradition of artist self-portraits in the museum’s collection. Its walls covered with paintings, the second gallery evokes the early display of the House of Medici. The majority of the forty works on view here are simply flowers. The purity of this theme allowed the artist to experiment with unchecked audaciousness, applying both new and old painting techniques: after studying the metalpoint drawings in the Uffizi’s collection, he used ignited incense sticks to sketch directly on the canvas. Inspired by the banned 16th-century erotic booklet of the same name, I Modi, depicts sixteen images of different sexual positions. Cai Guo-Qiang condensed the separate originals into one spatial-temporal plane, as sixteen moments in a single intimate encounter. In Study of Birds, Cai pays tributes to Leonardo da Vinci—who devoted his great imagination to science and art, for the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death.
Cai Guo-Qiangexplains, “When looking at the paintings of Old Masters, we can still feel the warmth and emotion of creating art, as well as the warmth and emotion with which art used to be created in the past. Do we, as artists today, continue to pass this warmth on to our successors? I want to believe…”
The curators Eike Schmidtand Laura Donaticomment in the exhibition’s introduction: “In the balancing act between his attempt to contain the natural elements—beginning with fire—and his desire to lose control and to release a creative force that transcends human forces, Cai is located exactly at the midpoint between East and West. For the Uffizi Galleries, this is an opportunity to re-read through a contemporary lens, regardless of the geographic temporal borders.”
On November 18th,Cai Guo-Qiang realized the daytime explosion event City of Flowers in the Skyon Piazzale Michelangelo to mark the opening of the exhibition. For the explosion event, the artist also created a 24-meter color gunpowder artwork on handmade hemp paper in an attempt to evince the ambience and framework of the explosion within a gunpowder drawing, which in turn became the finale of the ten rooms in the solo exhibition Flora Commedia. Cai Guo-Qiangexplains, “The fireworks explode thousands of flowers resembling those ofthe Renaissance, while at the same time evoke the palettes of Renaissance masters. The Uffizi’s sumptuous collection seems to overflow from its ancient architecture, merging into one with the city that nourishes her… I chose the gallery that faces the Piazza della Signoria in order to facilitate a connection between the drawing within and the society without. I imagine that, for an instant, visitors standing in the gallery will see the Uffizi’s walls fade into transparency, and marvel as the boundary blurs between the artwork on paper and artwork in the sky.”
Germano Celant, art historian and curator,remarks: “The whole of Cai’s practice turns around the formulation of a passage between distinct moments, so that everything is in evolution: from the drawing to the event, from the image to reality, from darkness to light.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue – Italian, English and Mandarin Chinese editions- with essays by Eike Schmidt, the Uffizi Director, Germano Celant, art historian Sir Simon Schama,Flora Commedia co-curator Laura Donati, and the artist himself. Sir Simon Schama remarks at the end of his essay, “All great art is the result of a hard negotiation between the conceiving artist and the resistance of materials. Though Cai in his modest fashion likes to stress the ways in which powder, smoke, fire and light can and should get away from his designing hand, the fact remains that, as with every bona fide genius, his mind is the only source of the kindling spark.”
Three short documentary videosdirected by Shanshan Xia will be released in conjunction with Flora Commedia, revealing the artist’s persistence, vacillation, and self-doubt on this journey through painting and daytime explosion event.
At 10 am on November 20th, the Uffizi will host a panel discussionilluminatingFlora Commediaat Vasari Hall. Panelists will include Eike Schmidt, Laura Donati, Simon Schama, Renata Pintus, and Cai Guo-Qiang.
Flora Commediais realized thanks to the support of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, the Municipality of Florence, Mr. and Mrs. Silas Chou, Mr. and Mrs. Cheung Chung Kiu, Mr. David Su together with ART CARE Art Consultant co., Ltd. and the Shanghai International Culture Association.
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