MAY CORNET

From now on

Dal 20 Gennaio 2007 Al 10 Marzo 2007

20 January - end February 2007

FROM NOW ON is the title of the show that will open the 2007 exhibition programme at the Galleria Alessandro Bagnai, in Florence. It is the first solo exhibition in Italy of the young British artist May Cornet.

Born in London in 1975, where she currently lives and works, May Cornet spent her childhood between France and England and grew up deeply immersed in the world of art, granddaughter of the painter Lucian Freud and the sculptor Jacob Epstein.
The encounter with Italy and Venice, immediately after her degree in 1998, was very important and of great inspiration to her work. The relationship with Italy, that has continued over the years, has most certainly represented a form of independence from her life in England and France.
During these years May Cornet has held various exhibitions in Europe and Great Britain, developing ever increasingly ambitious large scale works, installations and drawings.

FROM NOW ON returns to a few themes which May Cornet has been working on since 2004, the period she spent as resident artist at the Walsall New Art Gallery, a project sponsored by the Tate Gallery. The large spaces of the Galleria Alessandro Bagnai combine well with the artists’ needs for large dimensions. The “Portable Garden”, a delicate wooden suitcase at the entrance of the Gallery, gathers the whole content of the exhibition: here, in miniature, one can find a small screen in white leather painted with dense blades of grass, and small black forms amongst which a bridge, three ducks and two different spheres defined by twelve pentagons. In the next room, the portable garden is suddenly transformed into an enormous installation, “La fine dell’infanzia” (The End of Childhood), where each element is magically enlarged, we are in a real garden, a timeless place to walk through and share. Everything is man sized, and part of the wall, c.16 metres, is full of these dense blades of grass. A garden – writes Antonella Villanova in the catalogue introduction – that makes the reminiscences and places of our memory come to mind, more precisely our childhood, where everything seemed possible, even in the saddest moments.
Next door in the other rooms known as drawing room, big drawings of the series “O-drawing” and “Lover’s rock” are exhibited, polyptics with lots of little pulsating “O” shaped marks, all played out in nuances of grey, that seem to depict as many other maps.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an introduction by Antonella Villanova, texts by Lòrànd Hegyi, Peter De Bolle and an interview with the artist carried out by Raffaella Guidobono.


GALLERIA ALESSANDRO BAGNAI
Via Coluccio Salutati, 4r - 50126 Florence
t. +39 055 6802066 – f. +39 055 6814190
galleriabagnai@tin.it www.galleriabagnai.it
Opening hours: from Monday to Saturday: 10.00-13.00 / 14.30 -19.00

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