MAURIZIO ANZERI
Tuesday 28 April - Friday 19 June
Tuesday 28 April - Friday 19 June
Unique in his choice of hair as an art medium, Italian artist Maurizio Anzeri's life-size hair sculptures portray the human form as hollow sarcophagi. Anzeri (b. 1969 Loano, Italy) teases and spins hair into tightly-wove plaits and rolls, creating a body-bag of coiffured assumption.
Working with the accepted sign systems of the figure, Anzeri offers new symbols, new 'identifiers'. Illegitimate offspring of the historic periwig. His ducal figures cast unnerving shadows. Louis XV silhouettes sit flamboyant atop their downy bodices.
The artist creates an additional classification system through needlework and embroidery, a second Anzerian semiology. In addition to the sculptures, found family photographs are reinvented with embroidered threads of colour pulled tight to create new facial contours. New expressions radiate from the eyes of strangers, needlework veils mask what was.
Anzeri changes the past context, the present and also the future, of his 'family group'. A very private reality becoming an entirely public fantasy.
Maurizio Anzeri lives and works in London.
Working with the accepted sign systems of the figure, Anzeri offers new symbols, new 'identifiers'. Illegitimate offspring of the historic periwig. His ducal figures cast unnerving shadows. Louis XV silhouettes sit flamboyant atop their downy bodices.
The artist creates an additional classification system through needlework and embroidery, a second Anzerian semiology. In addition to the sculptures, found family photographs are reinvented with embroidered threads of colour pulled tight to create new facial contours. New expressions radiate from the eyes of strangers, needlework veils mask what was.
Anzeri changes the past context, the present and also the future, of his 'family group'. A very private reality becoming an entirely public fantasy.
Maurizio Anzeri lives and works in London.