For this year’s summer exhibition, I-20 Gallery will present an installation by Italian artist Piero Golia.
It’s difficult to locate a basic code to understand Piero Golia’s work for it escapes interpretation. He is playing on contradictions, announcing easy deductions, denying them in advance and eliminating all the clichés.
For this show Piero persuaded a pretty girl that he met on the street of Naples to have his portrait tattooed on her back as an image that will last forever.
His installation will consist of three floor-to-ceiling vinyl prints showing different stages of the tattoo in process. They result in a final photograph that shows the tattoo completed – a life-size portrait of the artist’s face on the girl’s back.
Playing ironically with the idea of the artistic ego and the longing for eternity, Golia touches classical issues of the artistic myth (what I dreamed to be and I’ll be forever) The playfulness of Golia’s irony becomes irritating if one considers how tangible the concept of eternity can become on someone’s own back.
In the back room another work is presented: “Giraffe with no title, but with a pedestal so high it makes her head bang on the ceiling”. The pedestal is obviously exceeding its function to a point where the inflatable toy giraffe’s newly achieved status as an art object is questioned again.
Piero Golia was born in Naples, Italy, in 1974, where he lives and works. In Fall 2001, Golia will have a solo exhibition at Viafarini, Milan, and will also be included in the Biennale di Tirana at the National Gallery. Previous solo exhibitions include Studio Morra, Naples, Maze Gallery, Turin, and Abraham Lubelski Gallery, New York, which was sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute of New York. Golia has also been included in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Siracusa, in the Museo di Castel S. Elmo, Napoli and Open Space, Milan.