Exhibition
Opening reception Tuesday September 14th, 6-8pm
Anna Galtarossa creates enormous, minutely detailed installations that feature a vast accumulation of imagery and objects, from dime store plastic toys, to tilting architectural constructions, and fetishistic totems made of snapshots and human hair.
For her first solo gallery exhibition, Galtarossa is presenting two major installations. ‘City (Anna)’, in the main gallery, is an enormous floor piece, a landscape traversed by a city perched precariously on top of a toy railway. The piece offers a complex mythology encoded in its many layers and details, it represents a self-portrait of sorts, an archaeology of life as it is lived. Masterfully orchestrating the relationship between micro and macro, the piece draws us in with its multiple individual dioramas, before we step back again and see the work as an enormous ‘exploded’ whole, a supine body.
In the second installation, ‘Mamma’, the viewer is invited to enter a dark fabric opening cut into the entrance to the back space at the gallery. Inside, we propel ourselves through a womb-like maze on a cushioned trolley. An ‘underwater’ world of awe and wonder opens up, one that is silent and separate from our own, but with it’s own self-sufficient ecosystem and internal relationships of cruelty and cooperation.
Galtarossa takes the notion of assemblage to a place it has never been before. Her installations resonate with a psychological power that is the outcome of a long process of personal research and reflection. The elements of her work become so fully integrated into her world, that they cease to be assemblage and take on an organic life all their own.
Artist Bio
Anna Galtorossa was born in Italy and, after studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Brera, completed her education at Fondazione Ratti, Como with professor Haim Steinbach in 1999. She has participated in group exhibitions curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Harald Szeeman in Berlin and Milan. Anna Galtarossa lives between New York and Italy.