Massimo Bartolini exhibition opens at Frith Street Gallery, London |   June 3, 2016

Massimo Bartolini’s most recent solo exhibition, Golden Square, is on view in London from May 25th through July 30th. The show is presented by Frith Street Gallery, in both its Golden Square and Soho Square locations. The eponymous exhibition is indeed in large part a meditation on the site itself, and draws heavily from the historical, artistic, and literary lore of its location. In Bartolini’s words, these works, which engage a host of various concepts and are realized across a myriad of media, constitute a kind of “memento mori” to the more than 4,000 seventeenth-century plague victims believed to have been buried in a mass grave beneath where Golden Square stands today.

Bartolini_FrithStreetGallery_airplane
Airplane (over 4000), 2016, bardiglio imperiale marble, 120.5 x 28 x 20 cm

Bartolini was the participant in the 2006 Olnick Spanu Art Program. More information about Conveyance, his site-specific work found on the grounds of the Olnick Spanu estate in Garrison, NY, can be found here. Golden Square is the latest of several exhibitions of Bartolini’s work at Frith Street in recent years, which include solo shows in 2008 and 2013, as well as this year’s group exhibition Tell it Slant. A short essay by the artist about the ideation of the current exhibition can be found here.

Francesco Arena in London |   February 13, 2016

A solo show by Olnick Spanu Art Program artist Francesco Arena entitled Autumn Lines recently opened at the Sprovieri Gallery, London (February 11 – April 30, 2016).

The exhibition presents a series of works conceived at the end of autumn 2015 and inspired by the recent mass migration towards Europe by hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn Syria and the Middle East.

Arena Sprovieri Art Gallery
Autumn Lines, Sprovieri Art Gallery, London, © Sprovieri Art Gallery

Arena’s sculptures arise from the geometric shapes of Minimal art and from the more archetypal ones of Arte Povera and are often the translation of formulae and numbers linked to specific histories and narrations.

All the four pieces featured in the show, albeit autonomous, are the translation of a numeric figure into a line, to which the title of the entire project alludes. Further information about the exhibition can be found here.