Ian Tweedy
«I’ll Meet You at the Rendezvous»
curated by Alessandro Rabottini
GAMeC - Galleria d'Arte Moderna
e Contemporanea, Bergamo

October 1 – November 30 2008



Press release
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As part of programming for Eldorado – the exhibition series that the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Bergamo dedicates to the most interesting artists on the international young artists scene – GAMeC presents I’ll Meet You at the Rendezvous, the first solo exhibition that a museum has dedicated to the emerging Ian Tweedy (Hahn, Germany, 1982. Lives and works in Milan).

Ian Tweedy
The hunter and the hunted
2008
various dimensions (17 papers)
Pencil, spray on colored paper

This artist of American origin, born and raised on a military base in Germany and now residing in Italy, Ian Tweedy has made his nomadic condition central to his work. His artistic activity is rooted in themes such as the relationship between individual biography and the collective past, suggestive appropriation of recent and remote history, a quest for new meanings for concepts of identity, belonging and freedom.

Ian Tweedy
The hunter and the hunted
2008
various dimensions (17 papers)
Pencil, spray on colored paper

Through the use of painting, collage, drawing, video and installation – techniques that are often combined with one another in an arrangement of figures, supports, atmospheres and meanings – the work of Tweedy pursues two primary research channels. The past and history are immense archives of images to be recuperated and transformed, while Street Art and Graffiti Art are experienced as creative forms that are in constant conflict with the everyday, unplanned and the frenetic succession of events in urban life.

On our cities’ walls, the images are short-lived: they only last until they are covered over by another work of graffiti, cancelled by restoration or simply consumed by time. Each image thus overlays a context made up of life, rumors and signs, a context that exists prior to that same image and that survives it

Ian Tweedy
I’ll Meet You at the Rendezvous
2008
various dimensions
Wall Drawing - acrylic painting on wall

Ian Tweedy
Plan A
2008
cm 200 x 150 ca.
Oil painting, pencil, spray on paper

Ian Tweedy carries this experience into painting, using supports that already have a memory, that bear the traces of a more or less recent past, such as the covers of old books, geographic maps worn out with use and even rags for cleaning paintbrushes. By combining the density of the archive with the crowded nature of the visual urban landscape, Tweedy creates an art of accumulation and memory, invention and survival, in which the images are the fruit of recuperation, cancellation and constant re-transcription.

This exhibition, which was expressly conceived for GAMeC and is entirely composed of original works, occupies three rooms in the museum and involves the use of a variety of media from painting to wall painting, from video to installation and drawing. What is usually the case with this artist’s work, is the images are originally photographs or, at least, betray a photographic nature that also emerges within their new role as paintings.

Ian Tweedy
Olympia, WA
2008
DVD Durata 4:53 min

His constant borrowing from a personal archive, betrays not just the central role of the collage and cinematographic montage in Tweedy’s art – understood as techniques and, particularly, as a means for operating and thought – but also his continuity with a painterly tradition that ranges from Robert Rauschenberg to Gerhard Richter and finally Luc Tuymans, and that finds its center in its relationship with photography.

Curator
Alessandro Rabottini

Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 BERGAMO

Opening
September 30 2008, 6.30 pm

Period
October 1 - November 30 2008


Catalogue and text by
Alessandro Rabottini e Luca Cerizza