ON VIEW

ROSE KLABIN.  "Where Is My Other Half?" (2010), 110x150 cm, Digital print on cotton paper, Edition of 2

16 Sep - 20 Oct 11
Opening reception: Fri 16 Sep 11. 6:00 - 9:00 pm

Rabbithole will be featuring works from Brazilian artists Rose Klabin and Rodolpho Parigi in an exhibition opening FRI 16 SEP 11. These works will be on view until 20 OCT 11.

Both Klabin and Parigi are considered among the most promising new figures in Brazilian contemporary art. After spending 15 years in between New York and London, where she had received her BA from New York University and two MFAs from Byam Shaw School and Central Saint Martins respectively, Klabin had recently returned to Brazil in 2007 where she continues to live and work today. Her multi-media works, at turns sculptural, performance-based, and photographic, reveal a focus on corporate and consumer culture through a process of overlaying and compositing multiple images that reflect a human role within a vision of commercial chaos.

The works for this exhibition are drawn from the 2010 series Dissociation 2 and showcase the artist as an observer of domestic and industrial spaces through the prism of psychoanalysis. Klabin’s work focuses spe- cifically on this overlap as a traumatic event, drawing upon the work of French psychologist Pierre Janet’s research on “dissociation”, or the idea that a person can disrupt the process of memory to distance himself from a psychological trauma, to underline the layers of rendering as congruent to a viewer’s ability to process or dismiss visual information either in part or as a whole.

The artist’s appearance in these works further disfigures this spatial relationship, heightening the sense of awareness between artist and viewer, which in turn parallels the mutual complicity born into the relation- ship between corporation and consumer, particularly in the voracious art fair culture.  Klabin’s performance work, entitled Rose Klabin Inc, which debuted at The Barge House in the group show “Quick and Dirty” curated by Jenny Ackerman in London in 2006, blended a reaction to warp-speed art commerce with an autobiographical context, and ultimately served to set the stage for current works that continue to question the modes of distribution and consumption within the art industry.

Rose Klabin’s works are included in private and public collections in Brazil, USA and Europe.

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RODOLPHO PARIGI "Magenta Grace Jones" (2011) 197x140cm, Colored pencil on paper

Rodolpho Parigi has quickly become known as a prodigious talent in the young Brazilian contemporary art scene, with two recent solo exhibitions at Sao Paolo’s Galeria Nara Roseler, as well as a solo exhibition at the AMT Torri & Germinian Gallery in Milan. He recently completed a special project in Leipzig, Germany, his works are in the collections of Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paolo, MAM Bahia, Itau Cultural, MARP, MAB and others.

From 2007 to 2009, Parigi created large-scale paintings and site-specific works composed of abstract environments using an intense palette of fragmented colors and blocks which gained much acclaim for its techni- cal and conceptual merits.

The procedural theme of layering present in Klabin’s work continues in Parigi’s. His recent works since 2010 feature a reduced palette, consisting primarily of magenta, red and pink hues, as well as a dominance of generally recognizable images layered upon each other. These works, rendered exquisitely in colored pencil, seem to reference biological studies and encyclopedic drawings, but their layering creates chimerical images the artist describes as “invented figurations”.

Parigi compares this process to that of remixing, where scraps and elements, texts and ideas are compiled to create a reconfigured whole. The iconic elements, such as the famous Grace Jones image, fuse with bodies and animal parts, tree branches and insects, resulting in highly imaginative hybridizations where the viewer can, as in Klabin’s work, once again consider whole or part as determined by the eye’s reading of the overlap- ping layers.

Nominated artist for PIPA 2011. Born in 1977, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Lives and works between Paris and Sao Paulo.

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