Judy Millar: Giraffe-Bottle-Gun, Santa Maria Maddalena
Judy Millar will be 'taking over' the interior of the Neo-Classical structure La Maddalena, the only circular church in Venice, designed by Tommaso Temanza and built in 1780. The largest piece in Millar's exhibition, sited in the centre of the church, will be a painting in the round, bulging and intruding into the viewer's space in three dimensions. In other parts of the church oddly- shaped canvasses will lean against the walls, stretching their elongated necks to the ceiling, making obvious their temporary placement in Venice and their provisional relationship with this place of worship and belief.
The generous and unusual physical dimensions of La Maddalena will allow a full play of spatial disruptions, dislocations and inversions. A large visceral image will surge and loop around the circular space, channeling the path of the viewer and establishing views and vistas around and across the architectural space. Tensions between notions of inside and outside, large and small and real and illusionistic space will unfold.
The exhibition ‘Giraffe-Bottle-Gun’ will instigate a lively dispute with the venue in which it intrudes, between the great history of Venetian painting and this contemporary practice.
A publication Judy Millar: You You, Me Me will be launched by Kerber Publisher, Bielefeld and Leipzig, to accompany Millar‘s appearance in Venice. A hardback book of 184pp in colour, it will mark key developments in Millar‘s practice from 1981 to the present. Two essays, in English and German, by Anthony Byrt and Leonhard Emmerling are accompanied by an interview between Millar and Justin Paton.
A second book will be published by Kerber publisher after the opening of the Biennale, documenting the realized exhibition ‘Giraffe-Bottle-Gun’. It will contain a foreword by Jenny Harper and an essay by Jennifer Gross.
Francis Upritchard: Save Yourself, Fondazione Claudio Buziol
‘I want to create a visionary landscape, which refers to the hallucinatory works of the medieval painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, and simultaneously draws on the utopian rhetoric of post-sixties counterculture, high modernist futurism and the warped dreams of survivalists, millenarians and social exiles.’
— Francis Upritchard
The installation Save Yourself by Francis Upritchard includes clusters of figures situated on table-like wooden platforms extending out from the base of giant antique mirrors within the three chambers within the Fondazione Claudio Buziol at the Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana overlooking the Grand Canal.
Each grouping occupies an imaginary landscape which exists in an indeterminate historical period. The figures populating these fantasy scenes are detailed with a psychedelic surface and a handmade quality. They are searchers, dreamers, dancers; consumed by their acts of meditation or lost in reverie.
The installation combines the antique and futuristic, making the scene both familiar and unsettling. The work explores ideas about time, hope and evolutionary change and points to uncertain boundaries between high and applied art as experienced through the lavish decor of the neo-Palladian Venetian palazzo, once home to British Consul John Smith (1744 to 1760) who is perhaps best know for his patronage of artist Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto).
Our venue partner for Francis Upritchard ‘Save Yourself’, Fondazione Claudio Buziol, supports initiatives and projects that assist young people in their education and training in order to help them develop their creative abilities and artistic expression.
A publication Francis Upritchard: Save Yourself is being published to accompany the exhibition by the project team and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. A hardback, linen covered book with 104pp, including 40pp colour plates and three essays in English and Italian by Heather Galbraith, Francesco Manacorda and Melanie Oliver. Available for sale from the pavilion during the Biennale, at a price of €20, or online through Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand.
