CAMeC
Centro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea della Spezia

Beatriz Millar
[pUR nUR] 

preview June 1st – 5.00 p.m.
opening June 1st – 6.00 p.m.

June 2nd > August 26th, 2012

The Borough of La Spezia and the Institution for Cultural Services present the first retrospective of the Swiss artist Beatriz Millar (Einsiedeln, 1967) at the CAMeC [pUR nUR].
Only about a year after her large solo exhibition at the Duolun Museum of Contemporary Art of Shanghai, Beatriz Millar now shows her latest series of works, entitled Salve Regina Souvenir, alongside the works created in the 1990s.
Millar’s art is conceptual, expressed in the forms of painting, sculpture, photography, videos and performances, in which she investigates both the worldly and the spiritual aspects of contemporary life. Starting from a process of awareness of self, of her body and her emotions, Millar’s method is to rapidly shift her gaze onto various levels of “enlargement or distancing”, focusing sometimes on the centrality of the individual, sometimes on the individual’s part in a complex system where every decision and every action produces direct consequences. Each work thus functions as a testimony and a revelation of its own role at a given moment, in relation to apparently distant worldly and non-worldly situations.
The dense symbolism in her works is the precise point of contact between these distant elements which constitute the numbers of a great equation the artist amuses herself trying to solve.
[pUR nUR], the title of the exhibition presented at the CAMeC, is a play on words regarding the concepts of light/material, pure/poor. It sums up Millar’s artistic vision, in which symbolism and experimentation with materials interact to create a poetic union among philosophies, histories and anecdotes. The exhibition explores those themes which in the past twenty years of production have most influenced and shaped her investigation of femininity, this always having been the main focus of her artistic interest. Beatriz’s woman is a figure recalling the Great Mother, the primitive divinity who had the power to give and take away life, and who is transformed into the mothers, prostitutes, sorceresses, gypsies and priestesses of the works on show here. [pUR nUR] in fact dedicates a whole room to the most recent project, Salve Regina Souvenir; in this the artist uses text and visual devices to journey back in time in search of the origins of the western concept of woman, inevitably finding herself face-to-face with her own personal and cultural history.
Born into a family of bakers, Millar discovers the female power of creation in the preparation of bread and in its offering up as nourishment. Through this simple gesture she investigates the roles which women have lost or acquired in contemporary societies, also questioning the border between intellectual and manual work, between art and craft.
The series of photographic works entitled Dedications, on the other hand, develops from an intense production of female figures in bread, photographed before and after their baking. These were given by the artist to the people close to her in the simplest aspects of daily life, thus setting off a series of small rituals which evoke apparently transient moments of togetherness generated by the offering and consumption of this staple food. The photographic works are accompanied by small bread sculptures which remind us of prehistoric Venuses or Pre-Columbian artefacts; these are inserted into Perspex niches, lending them the sacred flavour of  quasi-religious objects.
Finally the video work Lux Mater takes the viewer back to the starting-point of the exhibition, poetically and ironically reflecting on the processes of creation and transformation of elements.

 

 

CREDITS:
Beatriz Millar. [pUR nUR]

Promoting board
City of La Spezia
Massimo Federici, Mayor

Institution for Cultural Services
Cinzia Aloisini, President
Marzia Ratti, Director

with the collaboration of
FaMa Gallery – Verona

Title: Beatriz Millar. [pUR nUR]
Curated by: Matteo Pollini
Address: CAMeC – Centro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Piazza Battisti, 1 – La Spezia
Preview: June 1st – 5.00 p.m.
Opening: June 1st – 6.00 p.m.
Date: June 2nd > August 26th, 2012
Catalogue: Silvana Editoriale
Critical texts: Gabriella Belli, Matteo Pollini, Laura Rangoni, Erica Shiozaki
Curators: Eleonora Acerbi e Cinzia Compalati

INFORMATION AND CONTACTS
Opening hours:
Winter time: from Tuesday to Saturday 10.00 a.m. – 01.00 p.m. / 04.00 p.m. – 07.00 p.m.
Summer time (from June 21th to August 31st): 11.00 a.m. – 02.00 p.m. / 04.00 p.m. – 07.00 p.m.
Sunday and festivities 11.00 a.m. – 07.00 p.m.
Closed on Monday
Information and reservations: ph. + 39 0187 734593 / fax + 39 0187 256773 camec@comune.sp.it
Web: http://camec.spezianet.it - www.laspeziacultura.it
Press Office:
City of La Spezia: Luca Della Torre, Federica Stellini, Luca Bondielli
Ph. +39 0187 727328; ufficiostampa@comune.sp.it
Institution for Cultural Services: Cinzia Compalati – tel. +39 339 3494536 comunicazione@laspeziacultura.it