NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce Cercare nella Terra, a one-person exhibition of works by Beatrice Caracciolo. The exhibition will be on view at 465 West 23rd Street opening February 5, 2011, and will comprise Caracciolo’s series of photogravures and etchings exploring the representation of landscape and nature.

The works from Cercare nella Terra (or searching the land) are depictions of a landscape teetering between order and chaos. In her etchings, Caracciolo uses an expressive, tousled and jagged line that both delineates and disrupts her subject matter. The plowed fields, meadows and clearings she reproduces, though inherently bucolic and serene, seem overrun with disorder, on the verge of a tectonic unraveling.

“Her fluid, torqued line and layered, shifting imagery can suggest the forces of nature, growth, moving water or people in conflict, at the same time that it can remind us of preliterate mark-making or illegible writing. We begin to think about classical Chinese landscape painting, with its wide vocabulary of marks and gestures, and its vertiginous spaces, as well as the work of such Western masters of contingency as de Kooning and Guston (before 1970), and even Leonardo’s explosive studies of water currents and weather.”

The series arose from Caracciolo’s desire to dig “into the earth, into nature, taking the landscape almost as a witness, as proof of my belonging to the world. Trying to feel the inner life of the landscape.” The artist has equated her need for a material connection with nature and the world with the physical process of etching into the photogravures’ zinc plates. In these works, often based on aerial views, Caracciolo contrasts the fluidity and haziness of treetops and horizon lines with the rhythmic patterns of the cultivated earth. Together these works speak to experience and memory, as well as the “double contradictory systems of “soaring and constraining” that have become the hallmark of Caracciolo’s oeuvre.

Beatrice Caracciolo is an Italian artist based in Paris. Most recently, Caracciolo her work was the subject of a one-person exhibition Tumulti at the Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici (2010). Her series of drawings Life Lines was shown at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2002). The artist work is included in private collections in both the United States and Europe.

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