'Recto Verso' opens at Fondazione Prada
3 December 2015
From 3 December 2015 - 14 February 2016, the Fondazione Prada in Milan, Italy presents 'Recto Verso', a group exhibition presenting artworks that consciously foreground the customarily hidden or forgotten phenomenon of 'the back', including Trompe l'oeil. The Reverse of a Framed Painting (2008) by Gerard Byrne.The Western tradition tends to portray painting as a two dimensional artefact, whose sides are hidden in frames, and whose reverse if of no visual or cultural interest. In the Fondazione Prada Milano exhibition, artists flip the back of a canvas to the front by painting or photographing it, or drape translucent plastic instead of canvas, thus exposing the otherwise hidden structure as well as the wall behind. These simple aesthetic gestures reveal parallel historical examinations of truth, illusion and ways of seeing.
Participating artists include Carla Accardi, Louis-Léopold Boilly, Gerard Byrne, Sarah Charlesworth, Daniel Dezeuze, Llyn Foulkes, Philippe Gronon, Roy Lichtenstein, Matts Leiderstam, Gastone Novelli, Giulio Paolini and Pierre Toby.
For more information, please visit http://www.fondazioneprada.org/projects/recto-verso/
