Robert Grunenberg is delighted to announce “Alien Horti Picti”, a solo exhibition by Agostino Lacurci
A central theme in Agostino Lacurci’s work is metamorphosis. In his paintings, installations and monumental wall works, the Italian artist, born in 1986, breaks down ornamental and mythological motifs from the entire history of art and culture, from antiquity to modernity, into a colorful, luminous, geometric style. This reminds on the Italian postmodernism and magical realism – but also science fiction, horror, posthuman, speculative narratives.
The point of departure for Alien Horti Picti, Lacurci’s first solo exhibition at Robert Grunenberg, is his preoccupation with so-called “Invasive Alien Plants” – plants that have been introduced from other regions or climatic zones as a result of globalization, multiplying unchecked and destroying native ecosystems. To this end, in the paintings and murals of Alien Horti Picti, Lacurci creates fantastical hybrids of plant and human, with heads and limbs sprouting from symmetrically growing plants. Lacurci’s ornamental creations are meditations on strangeness, fear of the alien, the penetration of ecological, cultural, ideological systems, metamorphoses, the end of anthropocentric thinking, a new relationship between civilization and nature.
The idea of the “painted garden” is inspired by Lacurci’s fascination with the “grotesque” decor in Greco-Roman villas, rediscovered in the 15th century and extremely popular in the Renaissance and Mannerism. Lacurci transforms the ancient decor, in which flowers, fruits, vases, human bodies, chimeras and monsters merge and grow together, into the crisis-ridden 21st century – in which the anthropocentric hierarchy, in which man stands at the pinnacle of creation, must be abandoned.
The opening will be accompanied by a concert by Francesco Libetta and Giorgio Manni.
