Outside the line

Inizio evento 26.02.2022 | Fine evento 16.04.2022

z2o Sara Zanin is pleased to present the exhibition Outside the line, opening on Saturday, February 26, with works by Tomoe Hikita, Alexi Marshall, Nazzarena Poli Maramotti, Anna Maria Schönrock.

The group show offers a selection of recent works by four artists representing a generation born between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Far from wanting to be a survey on the state of figurative painting, the exhibition brings together four different ways of understanding the medium, united by a visionary aspect that goes beyond the limits of the external referent to transpose it on an intimate and symbolic level (Marshall), hybrid and halfway between figuration-abstraction (Hikita, Schönrock), expressive, borrowing suggestions from the landscape, as well as from portraiture and archive materials (Poli Maramotti).

Hikita, Marshall, Poli Maramotti and Schönrock are linked to a peculiar use of colour and to a very personal way of understanding the background and foreground. Their research summarizes a punctual attention to the restitution of a feeling of painting nourished by a variety of lines, rhythms and shades.

Driven by the need to recreate imaginative mythologies and new representations, Alexi Marshall (Great Britain, 1995) conducts a research that moves through multiple traditions, mixing symbolic elements, personal narratives and perturbing female figures, both human and animal. Using different techniques and media – engraving on linoleum, mosaic and embroidery - Marshall makes folklore, animism and paganism the main elements devoted to subverting common sense through the activation of unconscious contents that emerge predominantly within large choral narratives. 

For Nazzarena Poli Maramotti (Italy, 1987), painting is generated by an expressive approach that becomes language, borrowing its ideas from the landscape, as well as from portraiture and archival materials. To build new stories and narratives is a fascination that arises from an accurate recognition of painting techniques, declined through a reflection that makes the canvas the main vehicle of the artist's gaze, placing it in a space in-between abstraction and figuration. Searching to overpass the limits by leading painting to return to itself without ever hiding from the viewer, Poli Maramotti's attention is inherent in the dynamic relationships that exist between figure and background, between colour and brushstrokes. 

The research of Anna Maria Schönrock (Germany, 1989) moves through two opposites, abstract and figurative, which the artist chooses to combine from time to time, triggering a blurred boundary between them, a subliminal tension that leads to the creation of new stories. If figuration appears in its link with plants, landscape and anthropomorphic elements, abstraction reverses the hierarchical relationships between surface and figure by activating visual short circuits capable of interrupting the line of demarcation between space and representation. Equating her research with the unpredictable nature of the expeditions of great explorers, Schönrock says: "Explorers have been a source of inspiration to me. I think of men like Ernest Shackleton, who not only made an incredible journey, but did not give up when he knew he was doomed to failure... As a painter, I find myself attracted by the unexpected that run explorers of all kinds. It encourages me to take risks."

In the work of Tomoe Hikita (Japan, 1985) it is the lightness of the colours to recreate, by contrast, an impression of robustness of the image that dominates unchallenged. Wood and wrapping paper become the imprinting base that allows the colour to acquire an expressiveness that blends with the lines of the painting. Depth and lightness thus assume the role of two fundamental constants to the organic development of the painting, born from the combination of soft and hard materials, and activated by the spatial impressions that surround it.

INFO:
Outside the line 
Tomoe Hikita, Alexi Marshall, Nazzarena Poli Maramotti, Anna Maria Schönrock 
Opening Saturday, February 26, 2022 | 11-7 pm
26 February > 16 April 2022
z2o Sara Zanin – Via della Vetrina 21, 00186  Rome
Gallery opening hours: Mon-Sat 1-7 pm 
Info: T. +39 06 70452261 |  info@z2ogalleria.it
Press office: Sara Zolla | press@sarazolla.com | T. + 39 346 8457982
We kindly remind that wearing a face mask and showing the super green pass will be mandatory.