Italian artist Agostino Iacurci employs various mediums including painting, sculpture,
drawing, installation and murals that he has extensively practiced on a monumental scale in public spaces. For Next, Iacurci has conceived a large, site-specific installation in the back room of the gallery comprising three paintings on canvas surrounded by murals. Born entirely from the imagination, his paintings seduce with their bright colors, stylized shapes and the silhouettes of unfamiliar characters. In reality, the artist’s repertoire refers to classical art, to archaeological finds, such as painted Greek, Roman or Etruscan vases, to Pompeian paintings, or to the ‘grotesques’ of the Domus Aurea and Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican loggias.
Reconstructing and manipulating heterogeneous sources and materials is at the core of Iacurci’s conceptual pursuit. The continuous return to the fundamentals of his pictorial practice coexists with more experimental mediums such as lighting and live plants, and themes, such as the Anthropocene. His unique visual language, composed of archaic and stylized motifs results from a combination of cultural references and personal memories: as a child he played with the found remains of ancient vases in the fields of his native Puglia after the passage of grave robbers. Color, for the artist, is an essential and powerful component, often at the intersection of art and popular culture. In his paintings, everything is greatly simplified, reduced to contrasting areas of color and lines that generate visions and symbolic, decorative motifs.
drawing, installation and murals that he has extensively practiced on a monumental scale in public spaces. For Next, Iacurci has conceived a large, site-specific installation in the back room of the gallery comprising three paintings on canvas surrounded by murals. Born entirely from the imagination, his paintings seduce with their bright colors, stylized shapes and the silhouettes of unfamiliar characters. In reality, the artist’s repertoire refers to classical art, to archaeological finds, such as painted Greek, Roman or Etruscan vases, to Pompeian paintings, or to the ‘grotesques’ of the Domus Aurea and Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican loggias.
Reconstructing and manipulating heterogeneous sources and materials is at the core of Iacurci’s conceptual pursuit. The continuous return to the fundamentals of his pictorial practice coexists with more experimental mediums such as lighting and live plants, and themes, such as the Anthropocene. His unique visual language, composed of archaic and stylized motifs results from a combination of cultural references and personal memories: as a child he played with the found remains of ancient vases in the fields of his native Puglia after the passage of grave robbers. Color, for the artist, is an essential and powerful component, often at the intersection of art and popular culture. In his paintings, everything is greatly simplified, reduced to contrasting areas of color and lines that generate visions and symbolic, decorative motifs.
