A new global millennium cocktail devoted to:

WOMEN PAINTERS FROM FIVE CONTINENTS

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Curated by Daniela Palazzoli

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In the unavoidable chaos of the decentralisation process in which we all live immersed during the building of the emerging worlds and the unbalances it provokes, I found that the feminine world offered some sort of welcome shelter and a fulfilling sense of affinity between people. Women represent a continuity of attention for the house, the family, children education, love and the handling and the transmission of feelings and memories. These are values which can be understood and shared immediately almost all over the world. We can count on it, but we are also in need of future-promising propositions. This is a rational as well as emotional reason to focus on the growing contemporary attitude of women artists who are able to shape the uniqueness of their pictorial styles through the interaction between their psychological intuition and awareness of the universal values of life and the new skills and pragmatic creative forces they are able to develop through a direct and shackle-breaking familiarity with the world. As a matter of fact our protagonists - all (with the exclusion of the aboriginal painter) between 27 and 40 years old - share human and creative biographies of a new kind: they have grown up in more than one country, they travel, have backgrounds, educations, and cultural and existential experiences which allow them to make critical confrontations and to feel and to act at ease everywhere in the world. With this show we are just starting to try out the potential of this new global millennium cocktail to whom WOMEN PAINTERS FROM FIVE CONTINENTS is devoted. “The choice of the art of painting, says OSART GALLERY’s Andrea Sirio Ortolani, springs from our devotion to this language through which mind and body converge at once to create an image message. Painting cultivates beauty, but also concentration and depth of thought. It is also a globally widespread art of amazing versatility, enhanced by a surprising and unexpected wealth of variables”.

Aborigine painter Ruby Williamson (1940 ca) carries us back to the ancestral reality of the southern continent, and the perennial ingeniousness and willpower of women artists who have overcome the barriers raised against them just to practise painting. Today they are very successful in interpreting with verve and imagination, through almost abstract forms the salient points of the landscape and settlements, thanks to which they live in communion with their villages.

For Texan painter Rosson Crow (1982) individual identity is nourished also through her relationship with the social environment she lives in. In Texas Painting (George Strait) her fascination with local culture develops around the interior where a Strait concert took place. The empty scenario becomes the background of the story, while her painting gestures, rich in improvisation and jazz, rock and country-style colouring, become the visually singing personality and accomplice which inhabits her ‘painted night-life’.

The South Korean artist Suejin Chung (1969) is an acrobatic jumbler who picks up and displays the almost infinite catalogue of goods, games and socializing activities of the modern world. Because for her “Painting is multi-dimensional geometry”, we need to single out the multi-dimensional grid structure of her work in order to locate and play the game of chess between reality and abstraction her paintings are preparing for us.

Iva Kontic (1982) immerses us in an installation whose inside is dark while the windows toward the exterior show an anonymous city view. What can I onlooker understand??? “It’s Belgrade, my city, she explains. But, above all, it is the representation of a failure, of a meeting missed”. I.e. for her this view is the music-score of a life. For many disenchanted present and future travellers this is the truthful anticipation into a sweet and sour glocal experience of no place.

Women from Hayv Kahraman - born in Iraq in 1981 - paintings are dames of great grace and beauty. Dames? Wait a second. Carefully observed, her slender necks ladies reveal a puppet, marionette like appearance, inculcated in them by cultures like the one of her provenance. She does not surrender to it as is proved by the utmost elasticity and lines subtlety of her paintings. Her style is the result of talent and relentless studies devoted to sumi art, Persian miniature and renaissance art (she has studied also in Florence) intertwined in a unique signature dialogue. In her case beauty encourages to overcome horror and to develop confidence in themselves and in the future, curiosity and participation to everybody’s life and culture.

For Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Anglo-Ghanian, 32, every face is a destiny. More conceptual than figurative, her portraits pursue the idea of strength and power which emanates from the works of the great portraitists of the past. Until now race and genre are more a subplot than a centre stage subject. To her, painting is not an optional though. It is only thanks to the dramatic light and shade effects inspired by Goya and Manet of her technique, that she succeeds in visualizing the non-existant and in nurturing the physical and almost touchable presence of her figures. We can see it happening in this narrative painting: The Partisans where a group of adepts, which seems to have been taken by surprise, as in a forced awakening, follow a charismatic woman figure similar to Lynette herself.

In the show the works stretch out toward us, arousing questions and engaging us in a silent dialogue. The attitude which inspires them is not just to intertain and to seduce us: they are treating subjects which are substantial to our future. We come out enhanced, and the started dialogue continues, among us and within ourselves.

Daniela Palazzoli