Marianne Vitale
Menemsha
02.12.23
24.02.24
Ortisei
New York artist Marianne Vitale unveils a new series of still life, or perhaps we should say 'agita life’ paintings. Within the placid, abstract interiors of her compositions lie carefully arranged objects rent apart by a recurring motif—the ravenous mouth of a fish frozen in threatening mid-bite. Vitale began this series during the summer while renting a studio in a defunct fishery refrigeration locker near the docks of Menemsha, a small fishing village in Massachusetts where the iconic movie Jaws was filmed.
If still life is typically associated with the historical celebration of life's pleasures, order, material comfort, and polite society, Vitale's gaping maws serve as urgent snapshots or warning cries for a world teetering on the brink of disaster and collapse. A world ruptured by you name it - our broken bond with nature, the climate crisis, the erosion of democracy, global instability. In the work Feelings, the relentless jaws, now pure symbol, dominate the pictorial space becoming a thundering, libidinous chorus. Vitale's distinctive gallows humor, combined with a vibrant interplay of color and form, imbues the canvases with disruptive energy.
This series seamlessly continues Vitale's exploration of abject figuration, a theme previously showcased in Bottle People, her transgressive bestiary of bronze phantasms, unveiled as part of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022 with the large-scale outdoor installation Bottles and Bridges: Advances in Collective Obliteration.
Also on view is Vitale’s new light sculpture Zebra, a scaled-down re-edition of the homonymous 2018 sculpture, which comprised two colossal metal diesel engine train fronts welded together to form a towering 3 meter standing lamp projecting an intense beam through its original headlights. The exhibited model, milled out of wood, is domesticized, further abstracted from its original collage of giant detritus while retaining its cautionary glow.
