Everything, Near-Far, 2022, cast methacrylate
©Foto Massimo Listri
Everything, Body-Soul, 2022, cast methacrylate
©Foto Massimo Listri
Chiara Dynys (Mantua 1956)
After discovering the work of Jeff Wall and Bill Viola, Chiara Dynys left university to pursue a career in art. Since the 1990s, she has explored the line between reality and metaphysics. In the early 1990s, she lived in Paris; from 1996 to 1999, she traveled and worked in New York and Milan, where she experimented with various materials, including light, glass, mirrors, ceramics, cast plastics, fabric, video and photography. She has had solo shows at the Center d’Art Contemporain in Geneva in 1996, Städtische Galerie in Stuttgart in 1999, Museo Cantonale in Lugano in 2001, Kunstmuseum in Bochum in 2003, Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 2004, Executive Development Centre in Wolfsberg in 2005, Rotonda della Besana in Milan in 2007, Museo Bilotti in Rome in 2008, Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2008, ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2005, 2006 and 2012, Archivio Centrale di Stato in 2010, Gerisch-Stiftung in Hamburg in 2013, Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan in 2013, and Museo Correr in Venice in 2019. She has exhibited in group shows at PAC in Milan, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro and Museu de Arte in São Paulo in 1989, Palacio del Marqués de la Scala in Valencia in 1990, Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne in 1992, Centre International d’Art Contemporain in Montreal in 1994, Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua in 2000, Scuderie del Quirinale and Mercati di Traiano in Rome in 2001, GNAM in Rome in 2005, 2013 and 2014, MART in Rovereto in 2005 and 2011, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in 2005 and 2010, Triennale di Milano in 2007, Villa Panza in Varese in 2009, Museo del Novecento in Milan in 2012, and Bocconi University in Milan in 2012. She participated in the Moscow Biennale in 2017 and in Soundlines of Contemporary Art (ICAE Armenia in Yerevan, 2018). Her works can be found in the collections of Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Applicata in Milan, MART in Rovereto, VAF-Stiftung in Frankfurt, UBS in Manno and Zurich, Museo Cantonale in Lugano, Kunstsammlung in Weimar, Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Mobimo in Zürich, Museo Poldi in Pezzoli, GNAM in Rome, and MAGA in Gallarate.
The bas-reliefs Body-Soul and Near-Far, which take the form of a book, belong to the series titled Everything, created in 2015. On the double pages of each volume, the artist sculpts a verbal-visual dyad, juxtaposing two words of opposite meanings. With this series, the artist addresses the theme of the antinomies that characterize human existence and prove to be essential to the balance. As Giorgio Verzotti observed, “the regime of duality has always governed the work of the artist,” who has repeatedly experimented with ambiguity in the perception of images. Here, however, Dynys plays less with visual trickery or optical illusions than with the metaphor of memory, linked to the knowledge of books, another line of her research. The idea of turning the book into an object of worship and into a work of art, explored by various artists starting in the 1960s, has been gradually reinforced by the spread of digital technologies, which could seem to make print media superfluous. This idea has fascinated the artist for some time: in books, she finds the ideal place for coincidentia oppositorum (the unity of opposites). The volumes, transparent and translucent, appear as a kind of Beulah, the mystical intermediate space between heaven and earth for William Blake: they are the realm of the subconscious and the oneiric source of poetic inspiration, where, to quote the English poet, “contraries are equally true.” For Dynys, the book, a symbol of culture, is the best instrument for resolving conflict. According to the artist, ideas arise from ideas and reading shapes our personality; consequently, culture can resolve all tensions between opposites and recompose division into unity. (Renata Cristina Mazzantini)