From November 10th until December 27th 2008, EL SOURDOG HEX e.V. will be presenting works by the Italian artist Gianni Piacentino (b. 1945, Coazze,Turin).

Gianni Piacentino lives and works in Turin, Italy. His work has been shown extensively in Europe since 1966 in public spaces such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome among others. In 1977 he participated the documenta 6, Kassel and in 1993 the XLV Biennale of Venice.

"The Italian sculptor Gianni Piacentino started out in Arte Povera but turned in the late 60's to making elegant Minimalist paintings and sculptures. Then he began to integrate his other career - as a sidecar motorcycle racer and custom motorcycle painter - into his art, creating sleek, semi-abstract representation of racing cars and airplanes." (...)
(Source: Ken Johnson, The New York Times)

"With a 36-year-career and more than 80 one-man and group exhibitions to his credit, Gianni Piacentino has been hidden in plain sight. His work resists simple categorization and all but invites misinterpretation, a circumstance that may in part account for his persistent low profile. Often defying prevailing currents, Picacentino arrived at certain artistic issues ahead of the crowd, and stayed to more deeply explore some of them long after the crowd had moved on."
(Source: Marcia E. Vetrocq, Art in America)

"For the Italian Futurists, who celebrated velocity, tumult and the headlong thrust toward tomorrow, a speeding car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. For Turin-based sculptor Gianni Piacentino, the choice between a Ferrari and a classical marble might not be so simple. An automobile racing by assumes an ideal smoothness an formal simplicity not unlike that of a stone figure worn by centuries of weather and the touch of thousands of hands, and such are the forms suggested simultaneously by Piacentino's elongated carlike (or airplane-like, or motorcycle-like) objects, which escape immediate perception to enter the permanence of memory. As a wheel spinning at a certain rate no longer seems to be moving, Piacentino's sculptures capture that moment of strange perceptual flux when speed turns into stasis and dynamism into immutability - just as they evoke the affective tipping point where the rush toward the future becomes nostalgia for the past".
(Source: Barry Schwabsky, Art Forum)

Exhibition:
November 10 - December 27, 2008
Tuesday to Saturday, 2pm – 6pm
Admission is free