NEW YORK, NY.- Gallery Molly Krom, NYC and Castello 925, Venice, Italy present Come Together : Collage

The idea for this show, which focuses on collage as an interdisciplinary and cross media form, developed as a result of intense discussions amongst a diverse group; the curators (Molly Merson and Luca Caldironi), psychoanalysts (Isaac Tylim, Luca Caldironi) and art writers (Sanda Iliescu and Nicola Davide Angerame).

The show can be viewed as a succession of collages, starting with the elements that come together in each artwork. Ultimately, even the space of the gallery becomes a collage, uniting the artworks by Joe Kupillas, Elise Church, and Luca Coser, the essays by Sanda Iliescu and Nicola Davide Angerame, and the vision of the curators.

Luca Coser is a Professor at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome. He studied in Venice with Emilio Vedova. In Luca Coser's collages, as in all of his work, the object (the "real thing") is hidden in parts and the fragments that remain reveal something that the artist sees as the essential, indestructible element of the image.

Elise Church sees herself as a "formalist, for whom the object, color and line are the materials for making art". Church is interested in what is being saved, what gets discarded and what eventually becomes a memory. Her earlier "Monolith" collages grew from fragments of old sewing patterns, that were transformed into mountain-like forms utilizing painting and drawing, with the collaged paper playing a minor role. In the “First Aid” series, the collages depend almost solely on found materials, such as cuttings from an aged Red Cross handbook and other collected papers. In her new work, the old found photographs are excised of there subject matter and pieces together around the void creating a peripheral focal point. Elise Church lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She attended Lacoste School of Arts and Parsons School of Design in Paris.

Joe Kupillas defines Collage as "combination of images pregnant with their own connotations". These images have a history created by the meanings ascribed to them by the authors and the previous viewers. Kupillas is fascinated by the possibilities of using these histories or meanings in his work. He appropriates magazine cutouts, book covers, art images in an unapologetically obvious way. But the resulting collages are uniquely his, both in form and meaning. Joe Kupillas lives and works in Westchester, NY. He has BFA from School of Visual Art. This is his second group exhibition at Molly Krom.

Sanda Iliescu is an Associate Professor of Art and Architecture at University of Virginia. She is the author of "The Hand and The Soul: Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art" , " the Garden as Collage" (studies in history of garden landscape design), " Beyond Cutand-Paste" and "Laocoon" (City Secrets: Rome, Robert Kahn, editor)

Nicola Davide Angerame is an art critic and curator who writes for Artribune and L'Unita. He is the director of the City Gallery of Andora "Palazzo Tagliaferro", and curator and director at Whitelabs, a contemporary art project space in Milan.

This exhibit will continue at Castello 925 from February 15 - March 2.