LANDSHAPES VON DIETER HUBER IN DER AUSSTELLUNG "DE RERUM NATURA" BEI 1000EVENTI, MILANO
Dieter Hubers LANDSHAPES in the show "The Rerum Natura" at 1000eventi, Milano.

http://www.1000eventigallery.com/

The Galleria 1000eventi is pleased to announce the opening of the joint exhibition

DE RERUM NATURA
giovedì 8 maggio ore 18.30

“Now come, and next hereafter apprehend / What sorts, how vastly different in form, / How varied in multitudinous shapes they are - / These old beginnings of the universe / Not in the sense that only few are furnished / With one like form, but rather not at all / In general have they likeness each with each [...].”

Composed in the 1st century BC, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura introduced late Republican Rome to the principles of Epicurean philosophy, during a period of profound crisis in its institutions and great uncertainty. Lucretius offered his contemporaries an efficacious means of attaining serenity through the satisfaction of needs, the elimination of pain and the liberation from fears. It is the universality of the themes it deals with that has guaranteed the undiminished popularity of the poem, which in addition to analyzing the physics of the natural world – the mechanisms of phenomena like the vacuum or lightning – also tackles such grand and eternal questions of human existence as the soul and the fear of death, even touching on matters like the loneliness of man and the end of an imperfect world or introducing absolutely unprecedented concepts for the time, such as free will.
In a period like the present one, racked with opposing ideologies and wars of religion, it seems that the questions and the fears which Lucretius had to deal with over two thousand years ago are still the same.
The exhibition brings together the works of twelve contemporary artists who have distinguished themselves by the originality of their investigation of the theme of nature, in the broadest sense of the term.
The aim is not to come up with answers but to raise questions, to sow the seeds of doubt through a layout that stimulates often contrasting sensations.
The exhibition opens with a work by Andrea Mastrovito that has never been shown before and a large canvas by Julian Schnabel, Primaveral: a preamble dedicated to the life-giving principle of eros which presides over every creative act and governs every aspect of nature.
They are followed, in the first room, by works by four artists who have conducted their own research into nature, making its elements the subject of their own creations: Circle by Richard Long, master of land art; Milk Stone by Wolfgang Laib, an example of aesthetic research into pure natural materials like milk, pollen and wax; Klone by Dieter Huber, a digital reworking of an imaginary landscape created by the union of two or more real landscapes; and a drawing by Tim Knowles that represents a recording of the random movements of the wind as it continually moves a pen on a sheet of paper over the course of a day.
The small room is a sort of Wunderkammer, a collection of works depicting contemporary fears and taboos: examples of the darker side of our existence are provided by two of Andy Warhol’s works from the Hammer and Sickle series, a canvas by Guillermo Kuitca, a piece of tattooed pigskin by Wim Delvoye, the photo of a severed head by Joel-Peter Witkin and an anthropomorphic sculpture by Charles Long.
The exhibition closes, in defiance of the obscurantism of ideologies, with two works that represent on the one hand the light of reason, Anselmo’s Neon, and on the other the solitude of the human being as a spectator in the theater of the world, Grazia Toderi’s Random.