NEW YORK, NY.- What do we talk about when we talk about the “human condition”? The multitude of responses leaves one struggling with the question and answer alike. This simultaneous certainty and uncertainty of the future is at the core of Cristina Fiorenza’s latest body of work presented at her first solo show at Gallery Molly Krom.

Her paintings address the theme of man and nature, of doom and hope in a figurative, dramatic, almost illustrative fashion. Men clinging to each other amidst turbulent waters, their distorted faces and ill defined bodies executed in iridescent colors of blue, purple and green. The milky waves and dreamlike objects create imagery that evokes both a fairytale atmosphere and very real scenarios of modern day calamities. The works on paper in this show serve to balance and, counterintuitively, to anchor these images with their reductive, clear lines and a subject matter that deals with shelter. They represent a selection of Fiorenza’s drawings and mixed media collages that grew out of her earlier (2009-2011) installations of stilt houses and tent like structures made from found materials.

Andre Lindhorst, who authored several essays about Cristina Fiorenza, wrote that her work is “permeated by a unique melancholy ….longing for a casual and harmonic order between man and man, and man and nature”.

Cristina Fiorenza was born in Naples, Italy. She lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Fiorenza studied architecture at the Technische Universität, Berlin, the Bauhaus Universität, Weimar, and Università degli studi di Napoli, Naples. She is a winner of the prestigious Strabag Art Award, Vienna. She exhibited in many group and solo shows in Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy and the Slovac Republic, including: I believe every word you say, (Strabag art lounge, Vienna), the soda gallery (Bratislava, Slovac Republic), Gallery Köppe (Berlin, Germany) and Galerie im Traklhaus (Salzburg, Austria). This is her first solo show in the United States.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question…. ---T.S. Eliot excerpt from The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock