A-One
Venue: ©2010 artnet - The art world online. All rights reserved. artnet is a registered trademark of artnet Worldwide Corporation, New York, NY, USA.Verona,
Italy
Start Date:2010-07-02 00:00:00
Description: OPENING: Thursday, July 1st, 2010, from 6 to 9 p.m.
Galleria Salvatore + Caroline Ala is proud to present a solo show featuring historic works by the New York artist A-One (1964-2001), considered to be one of the most talented figures in the generation of graffiti artists that emerged in the 1970’s.
The exhibition opens on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 from 6 to 9 p.m. and will be on view until Saturday, September 25th. The show includes about thirty works made with spray paint on canvas, cardboard and metal, in various dimensions, some measuring as much as 6 meters in length.
These works were shown for the first time in November 1983 at Galleria Salvatore Ala, Via Mameli 3, Milan. The show was an important preview, in Italy, of a new trend in art – known as graffitism – of great social as well as aesthetic implications. At the time, this was a purely American phenomenon. Italian visitors to the gallery were struck by the freshness of the painting and approach seen in the show by A-One. Soon other members of his circle arrived from New York for shows in Milan.
The amazement of the art world and success with the media were facilitated by the irresistible emotional force of the works, with such impulsive, driving energy that they became part of a sort of movement called the “wild style”. Painting/writing on the walls of the South Bronx, on supermarkets, skateboard parks, subway cars and rap music venues, A-One was one of the first and most vital painters to grant figurative form to the slang of New York’s neighborhoods. These artists were the true forerunners of what is called “street art” today.
During the hanging of these American style works for the exhibition at Galleria Ala in Milan, A-One, at the age of 19, a Bronx native and outstanding figure of the new metropolitan culture, decided to improvise on a large wall of the gallery on Via Mameli, inventing an appointment and a meeting between graffiti artists and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, with a large wall piece in which he rhymed: “Welcome Back my Friends to the Show that Never Ends”.
“I just paint because it’s fun, because I like it”. This was the artist’s reply to those who asked him about his reasons for making art, at the time of his first solo show in Italy. An immediate answer for an art based on communicative spontaneity.
His spray-can acrobatics created forms and haloes for ephemeral yet highly charged effects, perfectly preserved and lasting when done on the texture of canvas. His sign sped over cardboard and canvas, shifting from dripping to clear, hard edges. Paint and thought seem to blend in a single stroke. An interweaving of signs, symbols, tags in which his self-portrait is never lacking: the letter A.
Today we can still watch A-One thinking with spray paint. His graphic sign remains, a gesture that makes reality legible: on the one hand there is the artist, his rage against the mass culture he fights but also knows in great depth; of the other; the society, the quick, contradictory city. In the beginning, the letter A. At the center, the instant of movement that expresses, even prior to communication.
Anthony Clark (A-One) was born in New York City in 1964. Selected solo shows: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art contemporain (Paris, 2009); Galerie Quintessens (Utrecht, 1990); Piccolo Museum (Lecce, 1985); Galleria Salvatore Ala (Milan, 1983); Hamilton Place (New York, 1982). Selected group shows: GAMeC (Bergamo, 2007); Brooklyn Museum (New York, 2006); Federal Reserve Board Building (Washington D.C., 1991); Musée National des Monuments Français (Paris, 1991); Sagrato del Duomo (Milan 1984); XLI Venice Art Biennial (Venice, 1984) distinguishing himself as the youngest participant in the Biennale’s history; Studio 54 (New York, 1982), Fashion Moda (Bronx, New York, 1981). A-One died in Paris in 2001, at the age of 37, as a result of complications due to a brain hemorrhage.
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