NEW WORKS
ALBERTO BRUSAMOLINO
Sympathy for Japan Series, 2008
This new project steams from a recent artist’s travel to Japan and a fascination with its art and design tradition. Brusamolino’s new works are largely inspired by Japanese culture - samurai warriors, traditional Japanese ‘Ukiyo-e’ imagery and arts and crafts.
Dating back to the early 17th century, the woodblock imagery of Ukiyo-e sought to express an idealisation of contemporary urban life and typically depicts city life, featuring beautiful courtesans, bulky sumo wrestlers and actors.
Brusamolino’s objects of desire like Shunga mirror, 2008 relate directly to ‘Shunga’ (shunga means ‘pictures of spring’, spring being a euphemism for sex), a branch of ‘Ukiyo-e’ which sought to express sexual desire. Shunga illustrations were produced in Japan in the Edo period (1603-1868) and were sold either as single sheets or in book form, called ehon.
The faces of people engaging sex in shunga are full of expression, reveling the pain and pleasure of ecstatic moments. Both men’s and women’s genitalia are imaginatively enlarged; and clothes, made of richly printed textiles, simultaneously veil and underline the intrictate embraces of the lovers. The illustrations for the shunga books are wonderfully explicit pictures, intended for use in brothels as well as in private homes for the excitement of both men and women.
The images used in the works are created from cut-out magazines pages and photographic prints taken by the artist during his journey to Japan. The complete series will include both small and large scale works and will be presented at Whitecross Gallery London soon.
ALBERTO BRUSAMOLINO
Come, come, come into my world Series,
2007-2008
While Brusamolino has always worked with collage in various forms, his previous works are predominantly photographic, whereas his recent experimentations with the cut up technique source material from magazines together with his own photographs which he integrates with his own invented imagery; transformations that inspire us to re-imagine the world we inhabit. These techniques have brought him closer to an exploration of the figurative representations of the human body.
Using contemporary and historical sources from architecture, photography and art, Brusamolino manipulates meanings and shifts contexts through layering and juxtaposition.
[...] By inserting photographs of body-builders into a mosque (Untitled, 2007), he makes an uncanny, faux, twenty-first-century visual tableau. Through his work, Alberto Brusamolino critiques the explicit and latent ideologies and institutions that govern contemporary life. Another subject of his new work includes the ways in which appearance-based stereotypes obscure individual sexual identity. The resulting collage (Untitled Study, 2007) is a surrealistically morphed, often sexually ambiguous and unrecognizable being.
Brusamolino Statement
London 2008 (PDF)
