Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

Rockbund Art Museum is very proud to present the first major solo show in China of the Italian artist Paola Pivi with her latest outstanding installations and new productions. Born in Italy in 1971, the artist Paola Pivi works and lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Very productive in the international contemporary art scene since 1995, her paintings, installations, performances, photographs, videos are all inspired by an art of making upside down situations.

The artist produces works that comes from pre-existing ordinary materials and living creatures but the way she puts them into conjunction creates very extraordinary situations, unusual and enigmatic environments: paintings blooming into amazing colored pearls sculptures, ribbons standing as powerful minimalist installations, everyday liquids such as coffee or ink forming monochromatic paintings and sculptures.

Paola Pivi likes to generate ambiguous and contradictory feelings like lightness and weight, smoothness and violence, warm and cold, seriousness and absurdity, singularity and mass. As is often the case in Paola Pivi’s exhibitions, narration is not straightforward. The first impression of strong visual surprise gives way to an analysis that leads the viewer into an atypical, absurd, bizarre and extravagant world. The artist likes to create improbable situations, to be experienced and experimented with. Anything becomes possible.

Paola Pivi’s solo show at Rockbund Art Museum will comprise three impressive installations, one large outdoor drawing on billboard, and a selection of photograph, pearl painting and lamps, which offer original and critical views on formatted topics about our contemporary world. Criticality in Pivi’s work does not come out from a direct sociological or political attitude but it is powerfully activated through the permanent question of how picture has the power to subvert what we name reality – society, gender, and cultural identity – into an alienated space for representation. So the artist does not pretend to represent neither to comment the existing world, she really wants to subvert the world into anomalistic situations that could open to more critical approaches about our daily representations and to our potential for more powerful and creative visions. In this way, she cleverly captivates the eyes and the cultural backgrounds of any Asian and Western viewer by putting into question any pretentiousness of Truth about our general representations of the contemporary world.

To exhibit Paola Pivi’s work into an Asian and Chinese art context is also particularly relevant because her images are always asking for more demanding articulation between images and social content. In an art context where the majority of the artists are rushing into social topics, Pivi’s strategy is radically different: it is the intrusion of an anomalistic image into the social sphere which will overturn reality into new representations and will offer the visitor to experience a creative criticality.

Paola Pivi’s works are the outcome of weird yet extremely precise, cogent orderings of things: representations are striking in terms not only of their shape, color and lighting, but above all by their capacity to assert themselves as lightning-like intrusions into reality – with no narrative gambit, no symbolic justifications, and no metaphorical or allegorical convolutions. In other words, the art of Paola Pivi systematically gambles on images with the power to be more real than any other reality. Or to put it another way: the image is fantasy within reality.

上海外滩美术馆即将于7月7日起推出意大利艺术家波拉·彼薇（Paola Pivi）在中国的首场个展。波拉•彼薇1971年生于意大利，目前在阿拉斯加的安克雷奇市生活和工作。她从1995年开始活跃在国际当代艺术舞台之上，创作了大量的绘画、装置、行为、摄影和影像作品，致力用艺术创造各种倒错的情境。

波拉•彼薇作品中的材料和生物都是寻常普遍的，但她使用和并置这些元素的方式非常独特，创造出各种无与伦比的情境和非同一般的神秘感：例如在色彩绚烂的珍珠雕塑上绽放的绘画、缎带组成的简练但耀眼的装置、由日常生活中的液体如咖啡或墨水等组成的单色绘画和雕塑。

波拉•彼薇喜欢营造模糊而相互矛盾的感觉——轻盈和沉重、顺畅和狂暴、温暖和寒冷、严肃和荒谬、单一和众多。和她过去的展览一样，本次展览也不平铺直叙︰在强烈的视觉冲击之后，作品促使观者开始细致分析，引导他们慢慢进入一个非典型、荒诞、奇特而美轮美奂的世界。艺术家偏爱创造各种不可能的情境，引发新的体验和实验。在她的世界里，万物皆有可能。

波拉•彼薇在外滩美术馆的个展包括三组超大型装置作品、一幅大尺寸室外绘画，及一系列照片、珍珠画及灯光装置，以崭新、具批判性的观点反思当下的世界。彼薇的作品并不直接反映某种社会或政治态度，其批判的力量来自一个恒久的探索︰图像如何拥有它的颠覆力量，将我们称为真实的种种——社会、性别、文化身份——转化成一个再现的疏离空间。因此，艺术家没有假装要再现或评论这个世界，她真正的希望是颠覆世界，创造种种反常的情境，从而催生出更具批判性的日常表达，构成更强烈、更富创造力的视野。她的作品巧妙地吸引着来自西方或亚洲任何文化背景的眼睛，对我们描绘当代世界时怀着的所有虚伪的“真理”提出质问。

在亚洲与中国的艺术语境中展出波拉·彼薇的作品可谓恰逢其时，因为她创造的图像永远要求我们更深入去思考图像与社会现实之间的关系。当大部分艺术家都竞相为作品扣上社会议题时，彼薇的策略显得迥然不同：以奇特的图像侵入社会空间中，用崭新方法再现真实，让观众体验到她的富创造力的批判性。

波拉•彼薇将物件以奇特但极其精准、恰到好处的方式组合在一起。她的作品不止有震撼的形态、色彩和光线效果，更重要的是它们能像闪电一般侵入现实之中——作品中没有叙事的格局，没有象征性指涉，也没有隐喻或讽喻的意图，但波拉•彼薇的艺术坚信图像能比真实更加真实，又或者说︰图像是存在于真实中的幻想。