Sam3 (Elche, Spain, 1980) lives and works between Murcia and Madrid. The publication Arte Español Contemporaneo 1992 – 2013 (La Fábrica, 2013) includes him among the most important Spanish contemporary artists. His public interventions with large black anthropomorphic silhouettes are visible all over the world. Sam3’s “shadows”, as he calls them, reflect on the human condition: between refined poetry on one side and sharp irony on the other, these figures imply alternative meanings and often very provocative and subverting ones.

The silhouettes by Sam3 aspire to overcome the constraint of the human life and its temporary condition. The anthropomorphic figures represent the individual’s effort to reach a monumental glory set in a boundless eternal time. Such illusion is then interrupted when the silhouettes are driven purely by their emotions, leading them to short-sighted objectives, self-destructive fights, dictatorial conducts. They face the edge of existence. Sam3 uses a great variety of artistic techniques, from sculpture to murals, experimenting with videos and animations. For Monumental the artist will present at Wunderkammern a complete new series of artworks, ranging from ceramics, using black and white colours, to new works with graphite and ink on paper and canvas. Before the exhibition opening, he will produce a public intervention in Rome.

His exhibition Monumental is part of the new art project by Wunderkammern titled Limitless that will bring to the gallery five of the most important artists of the international Urban Art scene: Sam3 (Spain), L’Atlas (France), Sten&Lex (Italy), Alexey Luka (Russia) and 2501 (Italy). This project explores the concept of limit in its diverse forms and manifestations.

INFO

artist: Sam3

title: Monumental

opening: Saturday 4th October, 7pm

curated by: Giuseppe Ottavianelli

critical essay by: Peter Bengtsen

dates: 4th October to 8th November 2014

institutional patronage: Rome’s 5th District

With the support of: Cultural Office of the Spanish Embassy in Italy

Media Partners: Nufactory, Zero, almostCURATORS

Technical Partners: Eurostars Hotel, Colorificio Dagostini/CBD, Eurograph, CIAO CHECCA, Casale del Giglio, Alfani, Trebotti

WUNDERKAMMERN

Via Gabrio Serbelloni 124, Rome

web: www.wunderkammern.net

email: wunderkammern@wunderkammern.net

tel: +39 0645435662

free entry

opening hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 5pm to 8pm. For appointments, call: +39 3498112973

The personal element is fundamental to her work: this, together with universally recognized themes, is one of the various research fields of her artistic production. One of the most important among these is certainly the case of body, which is at the same time fertile research field and active tool to develop different projects: in “La viola e un poco nervosamente” (2010), the body of the artist abandons its social identity representation to play the role of a musical instrument: Silvia disappears, the artist disappears and gets replaced by an object which has a specific function, that is playing music. In this performance the heartbeat rhythm becomes the arrangement for an improvised melody underlining how our society gets actually influenced by the context where things appear and by labels they get. Silvia Giambrone shows us that a half-naked body is not necessarily an object of desire, something which is instead always maintained by today’s media bombing of images.
Following this, the performance “Eredità” (2008) is based on the analysis of seduction techniques and especially on the everyday habit of make-up: the artist attaches fake metal eyelashes on her eyes, symbols of the cosmetic habits to which women are forced from time immemorial because of the cultural legacy imposing on them to be pleasant to men’s eyes.
Silvia Giambrone’s body is then the target of a laser which is drawn on her naked skin in “Sotto tiro” (2013): the artist is subject of an unknown and unmotivated threat, that is the actual being within reach of a laser which turns her into a convicted victim. Such intrusive light signal might also represent the harassing gaze which is impossible to escape from and which violates personal intimacy causing discomfort.
“Teatro anatomico” (2012) is a performance presented on the occasion of the collective exhibition “Re-generation”: an embroidered collar is sewed on the artist’s neck. The brutality of the needle piercing her flesh contrasts with the simplicity of the artist’s reaction: she shows off her collar as an accessory which at the end of the performance has made her more beautiful, pleasant and feminine. This performance conveys a strongly symbolic message: the collar represents both religious and political authority (priests’ white collars, but even more the collars of those well-pressed shirts underneath powerful men’s coats), as well as rigor, recalling girls’ school uniforms and smocks. The fact that the collar is being sewed by hand inevitably refers back to feminist artistic production and culture, as well as to Italian women’s past condition which regarded to sewing as one of the few activities allowed.
Silvia Giambrone appropriates this technique and one of the first works where she employs it is “Il Pizzo” (2012): tiny fragments of blue lace cover the faces of female figures in her parents’ wedding pictures. Lace turns into a mask which hides these women’s identity: on the one hand, times has now changed them so much that they cannot even recognize themselves in those pictures anymore, on the other hand, this also implies the paradoxical possibility of preserving them from fading paper, which will make them completely disappear. Also, the artist leaves only the faces of male attendants in order to better underline how the theme of female beauty is again indelibly tied to the dictates of male culture.
Lace as the proof of an old female tradition tied to Southern Italy and to those female ancestors who spent their time sewing: these are the key concepts of the work “Made in Italy”. Our country is still strongly anchored to its past and this cultural weight, which is both a dead weight and a treasure to pass on posterity, is represented by a plaster block with stamped molds of collars. Giambrone’s “Made in Italy” is a mirror of nowadays society which once again portrays women in a condition dependent on men.
However, sewing is not useful to only create pretty and decorative clothes ornaments: proof of this is “Eroina” (2012), the hooked reproduction of the molecular structure of heroin. There is both a strong contrast between the concept of crochet hook itself and the final result, as well as a subtle meaning game around the title of the work: heroin, indeed, might be associated both with the drug and a powerful female figure come to rescue society.
One of her favorite communications media is writing. Language is the tool which allows Silvia Giambrone to create her “Autoritratto – Io nel settembre 2009 all’altezza di un universo senza risposte” (2010), where everything revolves around the concept of subtraction: there is, indeed, physical subtraction when she gets rid of all the letters which make up the title of the work from moving sheets with the letters of the alphabet. Inspiration for this piece comes from Carla Lonzi’s “Sputiamo su Hegel” which deals with the theme of the actual possibility for the subject to exist regardless of the dialectic condition which defines him, that is out of a definite context where he exists unwillingly.
Words meet the body in “Translation” (2009), a performance which investigates the relationship between language and reality: the language we speak is considered just like Law, a code which defines everything; however, someone’s hands simultaneously writing the same sentence in different languages help showing the illusion of the idea that there exists a correspondence between words and real objects. In the same way, the commandment “You shall have no other gods before me” is translated into another language and simultaneously written in two different ways by the same person, showing how the concept present in those words gets actually betrayed.
Attention to words is found also in “No Enemy” (2008), an installation with big and heavy wooden letters covered with lead which invade the foyer space of the third level of MART in Rovereto. The absence of space between the words “no” and “enemy” initially confuses the beholder who hardly understands the meaning of those words. Once again the artist unmasks the ambiguousness of language and the meanings attached to it.

Silvia Giambrone has been collaborating with various galleries: Il ponte contemporanea, Roma; Galleria Bonomo, Bari; Galleria Deanesi, Rovereto; Galleria Biagiotti, Firenze and starting from 2012 Galleria Doppelgaenger, Bari.

She has recently won the Main Prize at Kaunas Biennial.

Among her personal exhibitions: L’impero libero degli schiavi, Galleria Doppelgaenger, Bari (2012); Parallel Borders, Roma, curated by Mark Mangion (2012); Sotto falso nome, Fondazione Spazio13, Warsaw (2011); Fuori di me, Spazio Ferramenta, Torino, curated by Susanna Sara Mandice (2011); Invito all’opera, Galleria Il ponte contemporanea, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva (2010); More to come, Upload Art Project, curated by Silvia Conta, Federico Mazzonelli, Julia Trolp (2010); Speaking your language I learnt how to hate you, Galleria NextDoor, Roma, curated by L. Benedetti (2008).

Among her main collectives, the most recent ones are: KAUNAS BIENNAL UNITEXT ’13, National Museum of M. K. Čiurlionis (20013); Refuse, Ex Mattatoio di Testaccio, La Pelanda, Roma, curated by Roberto D’Onorio (2013); SUBJECTIVE MAPS/ DISAPPEARENCES, Parallel Borders 1 / Monuments & Shrines to Capitalism curated by Mark Mangion for Malta Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Iceland (2013); MEDITERRANEA 16, Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM), Ancona (2013); Autoritratti. Iscrizioni del femminile nell’arte italiana contemporanea, MAMbo, curted by Uliana Zanetti, Bologna (2013); Vetrinale, Roma, curated by Cecilia Casorati, Micol di Veroli e Yuri Elena (2012); Re-Generation, MACRO Testaccio, Roma, curated by Maria Alicata e Ilaria Gianni (2012).

www.silviagiambrone.com

Ruffo’s art is essentially linked to the basic elements of his architectural training: design, paper and drawing. All his works actually are the result of a meticulous planning close to details, and take shape on the sheet through a delicate but incisive sign. However, they don’t retain the two-dimensionality of a table because paper, carved, gains the third dimension. The result is a stratified work, with multiple visual and semantic readings that investigate the great themes of universal history, in particular individual freedom and dignity constantly threatened by massification underway in contemporary society.

With the installation Das Chinesische Reich (2007), the artist put the attention on what that he defines “ Chinese empire”: an impressive pyramid composed by boxes of goods from China represents the power of commercial dynamics that crush workers under the weight of exploitation. Inside the pyramid, infact, was made a niche wherein a video shows the condition of displaced persons and refugees attempting to cross the frontier to escape. Complete the title a quote from the book “Gomorra” by Roberto Saviano: “Goods have all the rights of movement that no human being may ever have”.

In artworks like Youth of the Hills (2008) he expresses, instead, the contradiction that you breathe in the territories of the Middle East conflict: a swarm of beetles covers a Second World War German panzer reproduced on scale. Insects have been carved on pages of Jewish prayers without destroying the integrity of the texts, sacred in the Jewish culture, and emerge from the work as if they were released from the sand, their natural habitat. The beetle is a symbol of strong religious affiliation of the people, because of the dramatic territorial dispute.

The same theme is tackled in the exhibition Un istante complesso (2009), curated by Ludovico Pratesi, at the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria of Pesaro. Protagonists are six large flags of the states in perennial conflicts: Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hamas. The flag, Pop symbol par excellence, was deprived of color that leaves its place to a graphic texture, dense overlapping of animal skulls: aggression, violence and death, but also stratification of people in their territory.

In his last works acquires great importance the theme of freedom, becomed almost a constant in his research.
During his residence in New York in 2010, Pietro Ruffo had the opportunity to meet young philosophers and artists from all over the world, and ask them questions about the notion of liberty. In this way was born Atlas of the various freedoms (2010-2011), a real geographic atlas wherein territories and faces overlap to form an audio-visual mapping of this universal concept, inspired by the thought of Isaiah Berlin.The installation is so composed by graphite portraits of this people and their interviews that can be listened through headphones that hang from above.
In other artworks the ideal of liberty is embodied by the dragonfly, insect carved and repeated on the intere installations’ surface. Is the case with Negative Liberty (2011) and Liberty House (2011), site specific installations that, as in a baroque trompe l’oeil, transform close locations in forests, finely drawed by pencil or painted in ink wherein the observer is immersed, almost like in a secret garden.
In Revolution Globe (2011) the dragonflies are carved, instead, on a large world map in paper, evoking the individual’s liberty to move without boundaries or restrictions: a direct reference to the revolutionaries episodes of the Arab Spring, caused by the absence of individual freedoms and human rights violations.
In World Spring (2012) the artist inserts on a geographical world map, single Arabic words (democracy, tyranny, peace, blood, etc.) extracted from the slogans used by protesters during the Arab Spring. Every word, painted in gold leaf, cut and placed in relief, is framed in a geometric pattern inspired by Islamic tiles. The result is an abstract network that covers the globe and symbolically connects distant and different regions and countries. A visual and conceptual metaphor of the web, the communication tool through which new generations of Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Yemenis, Syrians, have been in contact to organize and disseminate the revolutionary events.