Galleria Continua opens four unmissable exhibitions

Giovanni Ozzola and other international artists on show in San Gimignano

Galleria Continua of San Gimignano inaugurates four new exhibitions that bring the works of extraordinary contemporary artists to the heart of Tuscany.

In the exhibition halls of the gallery, which has been delighting its visitors with unmissable events for over 30 years, new stories are arriving to be told and discovered, including the first solo exhibition in Italy by Osvaldo Gonzalez.

Graduated from the Higher Institute of Art in Havana in 2006, Gonzalez comes directly from Cuba and brings to the stage a journey, not only physical but also personal. A Viaje, as his exhibition is called, through his passions and his main researches: the interest in the representation of interior spaces linked to his personal events and the desire to build new situations and experiences starting from the intervention on physical spaces.

Osvaldo Gonzalez - Viaje

Viaje is an installation made with scotch tape, and from a series of installations taken from his most recent series Archivo personal, made with scotch and resin on plexiglas. In all these works the translucent effect of the material is accentuated by the presence of light.
The journey, a theme dear to the artist, is personal, intimate, meticulous, but not individual. The depth of the images pushes, in fact, the viewer to get in touch with the artist, to cross the threshold of his works and be part of his journey.

Galleria Continua will also host the new exhibition project by Giovanni Ozzola specifically conceived for the gallery spaces.

Florentine by birth, but citizen of the world by adoption, the artist after having brought his works around the world arrives in San Gimignano with Single Act. As in a theatrical piece, everything happens and is contained in a totalizing image that contemplates in itself a multitude of aspects. The exhibition, conceived for the spaces of the tower, represents the extremes that are the essence of life: the day, the night, the masculine, the feminine, the internal, the external. A unicum that includes multiple truths, harmony and contrasts that come together in a poetic full of philosophical and universal questions.

His intervention reveals the specificity of Giovanni Ozzola's research that, embracing different artistic practices - in this case photography, sculpture and installation - is characterized by an investigation that always starts from the observation of the visible world, space and light. The dialogue with painting is constant and crosses all the fields of his action.

Among the protagonists of the new exhibitions also two protagonists of the contemporary art scene, Donna Kukama and Nandipha Mntambo, with the exhibition entitled La
Matière Vivante, curated by Simon Njami.

Donna Kukama e Nandipha Mntambo - La Matière Vivante

Two South African artists who, each in their own way, question the material. The matera prima from which, in alchemy, one accesses the "rubedo", the final distillation. Bronze, copper, steel, plaster, wood, animal skins are the elements from which they start to compose their stories. What is unique about matter is that it is alive. It is anchored to the present, to its materiality, but it contains a memory that goes back to infinite times.

The work of these two artists is firmly anchored to a memory with which they play endlessly. Donna Kukama questions it through writing and performance, while Nandipha Mntambo stages herself in her sculptures, using her own body as a model.

Finally we also find Eyes in The Sky a curatorial project by Luigi Fassi and Alberto Salvadori that collects works by Leila Alaoui, Kader Attia, Alejandro Campins, Nikhil Chopra, Jonathas De Andrade, Shilpa Gupta, Aziz Hazara, Jorge Macchi, Ahmed Mater, Susana Pilar, José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Nari Ward.

Eyes in The Sky - Occhi verso il cielo di Luigi Fassi e Alberto Salvadori

In Eyes in the Sky the artists' work acts on memory, to safeguard it and help it define itself, creating images and memories. Their effort is to prevent our memory from reproducing events in a distorted way, creating false memories, alienating experiences that repress the living reality made of real and authentic images and experiences.

How do we save life from the catastrophes that loom over it? The artists' work sometimes raises a question about the unfiltered reality that their critical action places before us: wouldn't it be better to keep the past at a distance when it is too disturbing and do the same with the present if it is the scene of alarm and discomfort? Turning our gaze elsewhere is a powerful temptation even in the knowledge that keeping silent or repressing does not serve to make the narration of a truth or the spectre of its presence disappear.

Galleria Continua awaits you by appointment every day from May 29 to August 31, 2021, Monday to Sunday, from 10.00-13.00 to 14.00-19.00 for a new journey into art.