About

On September 23 ABC-ARTE open from 6:30 pm in Genoa the first Italian solo exhibition by the internationally acclaimed, London-based artist Zoe Williams (Salisbury 1983). Williams arrived in Albisola at the beginning of April 2022 to spend an almost three-month period as artist in residence at the Ernan Design Studio pottery, where she has produced the body of sculptural work that forms the nucleus of Capital Vice. The exhibition and the period as artist in residence are the result of a combined synergy involving the ABC-ARTE gallery (engaged in a series of projects to establish relations with young artists and international curators), Luca Bochicchio, the director of the MuDA and of the Casa Museo Jorn at Albissola Marina (the international cultural centre that has been promoting exhibitions of contemporary art based on periods of residence and workshops in collaboration with the Albisola pottery since 2016) and the Parisian Ciaccia-Levi gallery, which represents Zoe Williams and is taking part in this initiative. Williams’ residence at Albisola, promoted by ABC-ARTE and Ciaccia-Levi, is moreover the prelude to a long-term exhibition project which will involve the museums of Savona and Fraeme Projects in Marseille in 2023. Zoe Williams’ artistic practice is based on the construction of works installations that engage the emotional and sensorial perception of the viewer in a play of subversion, corrosion and transfer of the commonly accepted notions of eroticism, magic, gender, hedonism, excess and artisanal skill. The sculptures made for the exhibition Capital Vice play this game to the full. They are a response on the one hand to the artist’s need to give her own visions, anxieties and provocations physical, absolute form, and on the other hand to the awareness of the relation of complicity, study, involvement and diffidence that the images set up with the observer. Zoe Williams has imagined the four rooms of the ABC-ARTE gallery as the scenes for the unfolding of a dramatic narrative that may evoke both a medieval dramatic production and a Dario Argento horror film. The exhibition is in fact a psychosexual drama in four moments, in which symbolic and mysterious objects and persons appear, incorporated in enamels and brilliant, seductive colours: female busts, mythological figures, reflecting grotesques, slippers, accessories and fantastic Baroque vases. The conceptual framework of the exhibition is supported by multiple layers of meaning: Capital Vice as the seven deadly sins according to Christian theological doctrine (there are symbolic allusions to this in the cardinal red and the sublime Baroque decorations), and at the same time as the original sin of capitalism, the consumption and commodification of the individual (the shift from the intense red of the works towards the pulsating, bloody passion of sensual, opulent and ambiguous bodies). Genoese aesthetic and history – the background of the gallery – infuse inspiration and exuberance into the ceramic sculptures and all the multi-material installations of Zoe Williams. The clink of money, the dung, the figureheads of the ships, the roses, the sexual attributes of mythological figures like the Gorgon, revive the macabre purification ritual required by the epiphany of the divinity and, at the same time, bring us dangerously close to the abyss of commodification, gambling and greed. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new bilingual monograph published by ABC-ARTE with essays by the curator Luca Bochicchio, the critical contribution by Caterina Avataneo and a richly illustrated ensemble of images and documents.