STARLIGHT IN NEW YORK
Nancy Koltes is pleased to present an exhibition by the artist Gaialight: "Starlight in New York", Homage to Tribeca Film Festival; curated by Tiziana Gazzini.
Opening reception
Nancy Koltes at Home-31 Spring St., NYC Thursday, April 24th 6-8 pm.
RSVP to [email protected]
The show will run from April 25 through May 24, 2008.
Supported by Italian Cultural Institute.
Proposed by La Coda dell'Occhio-Cultural Association.
Press Release
The exhibition, proposed by the cultural association La coda dell’occhio, in collaboration with the GK / Agence ‘X’, is a homage to the Tribeca Film Festival (April 23 – May 4) by the Italo-American artist Gaialight, who works with icons of mass culture, dedicating particular attention to the cinema.
Gaialight, who lives and works between New York and Europe (her next exhibition will be inaugurated on June 5 at the Drissien Galerie, Munich, Germany), is the first artist to whom the stylist Nancy Koltes, number one in home fashions, opens one of her elegant stores. This artistic initiative combines cinema, fashion and culture and affirms the Italo-American creativity that contributed to the success of her griffe and her style, because it was precisely in Italy, in Como, during the ‘90’s, that Nancy began to produce her elegant household linens.
Twenty-five three dimensional collages will be exhibited on Spring Street, all realized with mixed media techniques on one of Gaialight’s favorite objects: maxi-cans, on which the artist tells a story through pictures, with refined optical effects and ironic thematic juxtapositions. Protagonists are films and great stars of the international cinema tied to the city of New York and the collective imagination of the American and Italo-American cinema: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, the Lolitas, Sue Lyon, Jody Foster e Mina Suvari, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and John Travolta’s Brooklyn in Saturday Night Fever and Alberto Sordi in Un americano a Roma; Sex and the City and a surreal telephone conversation between Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and a character from the Muppet Show.
Some cans are expressly dedicated to sleep, or to dreams, like the dream-like close-up of Bob De Niro clouded in opium fumes in Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once upon a Time in America or Audrey Hepburn-Holly’s sleep scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or the Science of Sleep. Faces, places, words which Gaialight trasforms into form, signs and color to give life to works which are pleasant, or light, as is her stage name, but which are also profound, sarcastic and poetic.
The exhibit includes two of the artist’s historical works, the Girls and Hom panels, mosaics of some of the greatest female and male stars of motion picture history, from Marlon Brando to Grace Kelly, in a new version realized expressly for the New York exhibition.
A homage to the Tribeca Film Festival visualizing cinema as a dream dreamed by everybody together (Jean Cocteau).