Sara VanDerBeek

Curated by Cloé Perrone
31 October – 24 November 2012

Fondazione Memmo, which has been organizing shows of ancient art since 1990, is proud to announce a new exhibition program dedicated to contemporary art.

For her first Italian exhibition, the young American artist realizes, in the stables of Palazzo Ruspoli, a site specific work based on her recent visit in July 2012 to the city of Rome.

In her work, Sara VanDerBeek explores the topics of appropriation and reproducibility by focusing on the use of sculpture and photography. Her first photographs were catches of small sculptures constructed in studio made of found images and objects, that after been shoot where destructed. These images are the only residual of this first creative process. In contrast to her earlier practice, today the artist inserts in the exhibition space models with highly geometric shapes, which she produced, as well as photographs of sculptures and places that refer to ancient civilizations and history thus creating a dialogue between photography and sculpture, past and present.

Following the scope of Fondazione Memmo – Arte Contemporanea, Sara VanDerBeek creates a site specific project as the result of her summer residency in the Italian capital. Through this opportunity, Sara broadened her researches on sculpture by observating archaeological finds, studied and contemplated in their original context. “In developing this project, I have considered the city of Rome as it exists as a space that is at once past and present and with this my interpretation of it transforms from one work to the next” she declares and finds in the idea of “eternal city” the synthesis of time, culture and images “a continual transition that has occurred most dramatically in Rome, but in all cities, spaces, objects and individuals over time.”

In the continuum of sculpture and visual images, the artist explores the dialogue between history and memory, image and photography, as well as the notion of culture rediscovered in eternal and universal models used by all cultures throughout time.

Sara VanDerBeek was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1976. She studied at the Cooper Union School in New York. She has had solo shows at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Whitney Museum of American Art (2010); Metro Pictures, New York, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; and The Approach, London. Her work has been exhibited at the Zabludowicz Collection, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Guggenheim, New York and Bilbao; MoMA and ICP, New York. She lives and works in New York.

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