NEW YORK—Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present Battaglia, an exhibition of new drawings by Beatrice Caracciolo. The show will be on view from February 16 – March 23 at 534 West 21st Street.

For this exhibition, Caracciolo brings her vigorous, precise linework to bear on the theme of the crowd scene. The artist has used the Cartier-Bresson photograph Vente d’or dans les dermiers jours du Kuomintang, Shanghai, Chine, 1949, which depicts a street protest in China. In the Battaglia (Battle), and Lotta (Fight) works shown here, Caracciolo’s drawings tap the unpredictable vitality of bodies in violent motion: “the aesthetic equivalent of a fragile equilibrium threatened by a fracture.”[1]

Caracciolo’s drawings engage the limits of abstraction, both distilling and disrupting the photographic image, her frequent source material. Working from forms caught in motion, her keenly observed drawings reveal frenetic, entangled bodies. Beneath their surfaces, the pentimenti of past markings suggest additional voluminous depths.

Beatrice Caracciolo is an Italian artist based in Paris. In 2012, her work was shown at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris and at the Château de Haroué in Haroué, France. In 2010, Caracciolo’s work was the subject of a one-person exhibition Tumulti at the Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici. Her series of drawings Life Lines was shown at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia in 2002. Caracciolo’s most recent show at Paula Cooper Gallery was Cercare nella Terra, in 2011.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or 
info@paulacoopergallery.com

1. Berggruen, Olivier. “Le mouvement de la ligne.” In Beatrice Caracciolo: Tumulti, 12-27. Paris: Editions du Regard, 2009.