EYEDENTITY

Galleria Mucciaccia inaugurates on Thursday 22 March 2018 at 6.30 pm Eyedentity, the first solo exhibition in Rome by the British/French artist Stephane Graff. His artistic research is strongly influenced by the theories of psychoanalysis, and themes of identity and memory .

The exhibition will include a selection of works from the artist‟s most famous series, starting with early works, from the photo-realistic series “Black Box” (1991), in which the artist conceals the eyes of his subjects, such as The Victorian Painter (2006) and “The Kiss” (2005), to his most recent “Glitch Paintings”, inspired by distorted images seen on television during a powerful electrical storm, such as Rear Window (from the movie The Window on the Courtyard by Alfred Hitchcock).

Paintings from his impressive “Mille-Feuille” series (2014), created with over one hundred strips of wood and assembled together, will also be on display. James Putnam wrote that Graff‟s unique techniques: “offer numerous variations of rearranging and distorting an image giving an animated effect similar to pixelation or the flickering of an old television and represents an interesting relationship between the analogue and digital.”

Finally, his most recent Mugshot portraits, resulting from the performance “E’ proibito sorridere” (Smiling Is Prohibited), held at Galleria Mucciaccia in June 2017, will be brought together on the lower ground floor and exhibited as a giant grid of 70 silkscreened mugshots. To each of these vintage styled portraits, Graff added a number and an anagram of the subject‟s name. These pictures relate to our “post-truth” era. In opposition to the superficial embellishment of the selfie trend, where one takes a photo of themselves in smiling poses, the artist specifically asked his models not to smile: “I found that a photo in which the subject does not smile often makes a more powerful statement and removes any trace of triviality“.

Graff refers to the work as „Anti-Identity Portraits‟. Costantino D‟Orazio explains his Mugshots relate to Minimalism: “A scenario where feelings and reactions are taken away from the subjects, along with the possibility of identifying them with a name or a story.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a monograph and a catalogue with critical essays by Costantino D’Orazio and James Putnam.

Stephane Graff (1965) lives and works in London. Stephane Graff addresses themes of identity and memory. His most extensive bodies of work are the „Black Box‟ paintings, the „Constrictions‟ photographic series, and the „Mille-Feuille‟ paintings, which are made on numerous strips of wood, combining the disciplines of painting and sculpture. Graff has exhibited internationally such as Almine Rech Gallery, in London (2016); Musée d‟Art Modern et Contemporain in Nice, France (2013); Ercel Foundation in Turin, Italy (2010); Operating Room, Amerikan Hastanesi, Istanbul (2010); Musee de Marrakech, Morocco (2004); and Museum of Mankind in London (1991).