is happy to announce the first solo exhibition of Thea Djordjadze in Italy, that will open on Sunday, October 10 in the gallery's new space in via di Porta Tenaglia 7, Milan.
Thea Djordjadze's installations and sculptures open the stage on the curtains of memory: the memory of a process that appears still in the making and the memory of lived scenarios.
Materials like plaster, wood and ceramic, along with fabric and sponge - more openly suggestive of a sphere of feminine domesticity - are assembled in what looks like an almost intuitive process, creating compositions that are often structured as architectural settings, in which the modernist language seems buried by the dust of time and repositioned within atemporal essentiality.
In this recreation of an imagined archaeology, the viewer is invited into a process of ongoing research, in which the transformation and assemblage of materials is sedimented in the objects, themselves awaiting reactivation. Der Knacks (2007), a plaster sculpture broken and then reassembled in an almost instable formation, is in this sense emblematic of the artist's method of production. The title of the work refers, not coincidentally, to Francis Scott Fitzgerald's collection of writings, The Crack Up, in which break or failure is indicated as the fulcrum of the creative process.
Memory plays a significant role in the work of Thea Djordjadze: the reuse of artefacts, like carpets and handmade objects, can in this sense be read as the sedimentation of an ancient history, structuring them in a foreign place and time.
This hybridization of found objects and artefacts generates a series of references in the titles of the works, taken at times from diverse fields such as literature and architecture, that work to amplify the echo of a collective memory.
Thea Djordjadze, born in 1971 in Tbilisi, Georgia, lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Academy of Arts in Tbilisi, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Dieter Krieg e Rosemarie Trockel, with whom she worked on several occasions, including the XI Biennale de Lyon in 2007.
Selected solo shows: Capital Letter, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2010); Endless Enclosure, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Thea Djordjadze, westlondonprojects, London, Explain away, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, Occasional Exercise, Micky Schubert, Berlin (2009); Thea Djordjadze, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany (2008, catalog); Possibility, Nansen, Studio Voltaire, London (2007).
Selected group shows: New Décor, Hayward Gallery, London (2010), The Promises of the Past, Centre Pompidou, Parigi (2010); V Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2008); XI Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2007).