Works from a Private Collection

Milano, 7/7 – 20/7, 2013

Jerome Zodo Contemporary is proud to present a collection of Works from a Private Collection.
How do you create a private collection of contemporary art? Which criteria do you adopt to choose the works? Why do some museum artists manage to express themselves in dimensions that can also be suited to domestic spaces, thus more limited ones? Furthermore, do works by artists end up defining the portrait of the collector, who is surrounded by objects in his own image and likeness?

These are the spontaneous questions that arise whenever we look into the private space of a collection. In this case, the owner of the Gallery Jerome Zodo has called upon the complicity of a Milanese collector who has agreed to deprive himself, for several weeks, of some of the works of art that usually occupy their places on the walls of his home, thus allowing them to return to the place from where they left, the gallery.

The inferred path is on the one hand coherent and on the other surprising with unexpected sidetracks. The strong nucleus is represented by American art, first of all by the portrait of Joan Sonnabend painted in the 1970s by Andy Warhol and belonging to the Pop Art movement.

Central is the group of works produced in the 1980s, starting with a spray painting by street artist Kenny Scharf in 1983, moving on to a very large collage by Donald Baechler. From painting we then pass onto photography, with some shots witness to the performance of Heidi in 1992-1993 at the Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna by Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy, or two of the hardest artists of the Californian area, and with a landscape by Anselm Kiefer, obtained through the manipulation of the photographic matrix with the use of painting and different materials.

An authentic rarity is the canvas by Japanese Yayoi Kusama, following the great personal exhibition at the Tate Modern last year in London, author in the 1960s-70s of a number of provocative performances in which polka dots were painted on the participants. Another author of happenings with a desecrating touch is cult provocateur Viennese Hermann Nitsch, represented in the collection by a bloody shirt created in 1998.

Closer to the present, we have to stress the work of Vik Muniz, a photographic print after an intervention with caramel, that represents the Ritratto di Piero Manzoni (Portrait of Piero Manzoni) involved in elaborating his famous boxes. On display there is also a recent work by Andrew Schoultz, one of the best known exponents of neo-psychedelics in Los Angeles, who has already been present with a personal exhibition in the Gallery.The Asian artistic scene is represented by Chinese Yue Minjun who with his terracotta warriors shows us the gap between contemporary Chinese art and that of traditional art of the 1990s with the birth of the Cynical Realism movement, of which the artist is one of the leading exponents.

The previously hinted foray is in the direction of Italian art, with that which is considered by many to be the precursor of pictorial conceptualism, Giorgio de Chirico in his customary guise of the 1970s. Completing the Exhibition is a large canvas by Luca Pignatelli, or the trait-d’union between figurative art and the use of anomalous materials connected to the tradition of Arte Povera.