ROME.- MACRO presents at. this moment, the first solo show by the Cypriot artist Phanos Kyriacou in Italy. The exhibition is part of Supplement, a series of projects — exhibitions and other initiatives — that offer free digressions from the formats of Museum for Preventive Imagination, launching in December. Supplement, which started in recent months, will continue in parallel with special commissions and collaborations, both inside and outside the museum, expressing its tentacular identity.
The exhibition project by Phanos Kyriacou has been created for the outdoor spaces of the central courtyard of the MACRO, where the artist presents a new group of works. From 15 October to 15 November, a community of different works conceived as a large installation will allow visitors to explore the relationships between conditions and states of matter, typical of Kyriacou’s work.
at. this moment communicates the relevance of the preposition at which denotes the time when an event is taking place, what we are looking at, and a specific state or condition.
«The installation will consist of sculptural elements of various materials shaped and arranged to rest upon, support and interact with each other», as anticipated by the artist. It is «a multifaceted transitional space-stage of possible expansions, altered functions, material and formal migrations conceptualised as a micro-society of objects capable of facilitating growth and change.»
Composed of heterogeneous parts, with different weights and forms — plaster, alabaster resin, steel, bronze, aluminium, epoxy resin, wood — the works act as reciprocal presences, creating an environment of possible, ever-changing relationships.
The combined object-tools behave differently; they are simultaneously archetypes and new potential subjects. Faced with such vernacular forms, visitors are prompted to apply a sociological interpretation of them. They are invited to slowly penetrate the different groups, investigating details, zooming in and out.
In his study of places and architectural elements, the artist traces back to the complexity of the material, recovering it in an archaic form, often collaborating with the artisans of Cyprus. His unruly structures transcribe their own origins while compiling new meanings in a site-specific logic.
We look at these different bodies of works, splitting them with our gaze, interacting with them, and engaging in a practice of discovery. Inside these experimental archaeologies, we create analogies, affinities and discrepancies, and investigate the emotional force of the materials. In this context, created for the space of the museum, taxonomies collapse or have to be reformulated, allowing the area to be transformed into a receptacle, a collection of images, signs, meanings.
Phanos Kyriakou, born in Nicosia in 1977, graduated from the Middlesex School of Fine Arts before completing a Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths University in London. In 2013 he co-represented Cyprus at the 55th Venice Art Biennale. He has had a number of solo presentations, including: NAPK THR // NIC Intonations, Party Contemporary, Nicosia (2019); a kind of there, there, Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia (2018); Garden Sculptures, Eins Gallery, Limassol; Exhaustion, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (2017); Daily Life, Maccarone, New York; Who is Nathan?, Rupert, Vilnius (2015); view to river from north, Maccarone, New York. He has also participated in a number of group exhibitions, including: Hypersurfacing, NiMAC, Nicosia (2019); The garden sees, Athens Concert Hall Garden, Athens (2017); completely something else, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (2016); One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, Kunsthalle Wien (2014); Fusiform Gyrus, Lisson Gallery, London (2013). In 2003 he founded the Midget Factory project space in Nicosia, which he managed until 2012.
