Giotto's Room
Post_Institute, London | Sept 26 - Oct 17, 2018
Bea Bonafini and Aisha Christison
Curator’s Note
Lucy von Goetz
I would like to present Giotto’s Room, a duo exhibition whose work could be said to span installation, tapestry, painting, drawing and furniture. Giotto’s Room features paintings and drawings by Aisha Christison, a collaboratively designed chair by Elliot Barnes and Bea Bonafini, and a unique tapestry commission for the gallery by Bea Bonafini – her largest work of this kind to date.
The idea of the exhibition began with a trip to the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi in the Umbrian region of central Italy, and my first encounter with the ancient jewel box that is Giotto’s frescoes, the walls of the church drenched in the deep blue of his skies. Drawing upon the visual themes and the architectural unity essential to Giotto’s depictions, I began to draw links with the work of Bea Bonafini; her carpet tapestries inverting the architecture of classical fresco painting, laying the image down underfoot and admitting the viewer as a narrative companion. Giotto’s use of the incidences of everyday life led me to imagine Aisha Christison’s dreamlike spaces in conversation with Bonafini’s tapestries. Giotto, Bonafini and Christison all weave the language of the mystic into the space of the everyday. What concerns all three artists is not the triteness of “the beauty of the banal,” but rather the enriching disparity between spaces as they are lived and those same spaces as we are conscious of them.
I hope that to experience Giotto’s Room is to feel immersed in a setting of enormous sumptuousness, elegant in its proportions, startling in its virtuosity and spatiality. And at the same time aware that it is reticent: to a remarkable degree it does not interfere with the drama played out within its confines. Bonafini’s tapestry forms an intimate and animated surrounding from which Christison’s drawings appear as windows, inlets and recesses for foliage and faces to emerge. Learning of Bonafini’s research into Neolithic cave paintings, cell walls of prisons in Palermo and Etruscan burial chambers, a history of dissidence, confinement, residence, passages and openings surface – the architecture of places of worship, equally as places of safety and of punishment.
When we experience the generous and powerful space that the art of the past five decades evokes, from the works of Richard Serra to Anselm Kiefer, we are to some extent feeling the echoes of the ambitions of the Italian fresco painting tradition. Giotto’s Room brings together art that addresses the imagination, sacred histories and heathen mythologies. Leading to work that is infinitely majestic, un-stifled, fracturing between illusory and tactile space. It constructs a proximate and sensuous space that is grounded—instead of heavenly. Through Bonafini’s floor-based work and Christison’s works on paper and canvas, the space is connected across surfaces; the architecture of the gallery space becoming constitutional to the work, as both support and framing device.
Working with these two artists has been an absolute dream and I cannot thank them enough for their ceaseless energy and commitment toward this exhibition.
To me all art is a strike for freedom, an expression of liberty, and that’s what we’re looking at, somebody making a move in a completely new territory, and asserting themselves in a new way. That kind of assertion of the self and a newness of the self is certainly endlessly exhilarating and inspiring.
Press Release
von Goetz is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Giotto’s Room, taking place at the newly refurbished Post_Institute in Brixton from the 26th September 2018 – 17th October 2018. The redesigned gallery space will show paintings and drawings by AISHA CHRISTISON and a unique commission for von Goetz by BEA BONAFINI.
Drawing upon the vaulted spaces of frescoes, perspectives and the imagery of the early Renaissance, Giotto’s Room takes its starting point as the ceilings, walls and floors of Italian palazzo’s, basilicas and chapels, remaking the spatial terms of the gallery as its immersive corollary.
Bea Bonafini’s carpet works can be said to invert the architecture of classical fresco painting, laying the image down underfoot and admitting the viewer as a narrative companion; to step into the composition of the work is to navigate the formal details of the piece—lines and colours, forms and fabrics—in addition to positioning oneself as a subject of and within the frame. This intimate encounter channels the spiritually charged environments of religious sites, whilst employing the image not as a hegemonic, totalitarian presence, but situates it as a common ground. The hierarchical structures of religious doctrine are flattened and given new life as a shared history and a unifying cultural architecture.
In Aisha Christison’s works, the dreamlike spaces of the canvas are collaged and fragmented. At times the figures and symbols give way to psychological landscapes and still lives, in others the thematics and motifs of the Baroque are woven into theatrical tableau, and utilised with a contemporary coolness—images are repeated, stylised, and refined to a gestural incident. The room, however, need not be limited to a reading on purely art historical terms that equate artistic-architectural structures and the perspectival image to that of church and state. How might the exhibition be read as Giotto’s studio? His bedroom, perhaps? His tomb? Aisha Christison’s paintings take on a double-meaning: the relationship to the “space as construct” situates the images as central to its reading, they become singled-out, personal, and profound.
To enter a designated space, therefore, is to enter a private, social (and cultural) situation that is administered under alternative formalities. The soft bounciness of carpet, fibres between toes, the smell of a rug’s unblemished pile, the framed image, the repeated figure, and the landscape—all recall the sensual and memorial. It is through the material that the works become transcendent, creating archetypal encounters through content and construction.
Accordingly, Giotto’s Room inflects the intricate and immersive perspectives of classical fresco painting, it constructs a proximate and sensuous space that is grounded—instead of heavenly. Through Bea Bonafini’s floor-based work and Aisha Christison’s works on paper and canvas, the space is connected across surfaces; the architecture of the gallery space becoming constitutional to the work, as both support and framing device. The elaborate spaces and common ground of Giotto’s Room, therefore, centralises the subjective experience, creating a discrete, intimate rendering of the image.
BEA BONAFINI studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (2014) and the Royal College of Art (2016). Selected exhibitions include: Shed Shreds (solo) Lychee One, London (2018), Dovetail’s Nest (solo), Zabludowicz Collection, London (2017), Chambre Dix, La Hotel Louisiane by Sans Titre 2016, Paris (2018), Et Refaire Le Monde, Galerie Bessieres, Paris (2018), Searching for Myself Through Remote Skins, Renata Fabbri, Milan (2018), If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Roaming Projects, London (2018), Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On The Bedpost Over Night)?, J Hammond Projects, London (2017). Upcoming shows include Memories Arrested in Space by ARTUNER, Italian Cultural Institue (2018) and a solo show at Renata Fabbri, Milan (2018)
AISHA CHRISTISON studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design (2012). Selected exhibitions include: If You Can’t Stand The Heat, Roaming Projects, London (2018), Terrasse 2017, Silicon Malley, Lausanne, Switzerland (2017), Night, White Crypt, London (2017), The Classical, Transition Gallery, London (2016), Américano Maison (solo), Barbican Arts Group Trust, London (2016).
Included in the limited edition signed catalogue for Giotto’s Room are two commissioned essays, Giotto: A Contemporary Artist by Piero Tomassoni and Field of Vision by Oliver Morris Jones
Curated by Lucy von Goetz
