Museum PR Announcements News and Information

Madre Museum announces Padraig Timoney. A lu tiempo de… (At the time of…)

The Madre Museum presents Padraig Timoney. A lu tiempo de… (At the time of…) an exhibition on view February 7–May 12, 2014 .

Pádraig Timoney, Meepmeep Popup, 2011. Courtesy the artist; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Napoli.
Pádraig Timoney, Meepmeep Popup, 2011. Courtesy the artist; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Napoli.
A lu tiempo de… (At the time of…) is the largest solo show ever devoted to the Irish artist Pádraig Timoney (b. 1968, Derry) in a public institution. This mid-career survey—comprising more than fifty works created over the last twenty years—also marks the artist’s symbolic return to Naples, the artist’s place of residence and production from 2004 to 2011. Timoney pays homage to Naples starting with the title of the show, which cites the opening words of ‘O Cunto ‘E Masaniello, a song published in 1974 by the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare. Timoney’s work is a deep and personal exploration of all the languages of painting and the nature of images, created with different means of expression: in addition to the main medium of painting, the artist makes use of photography, sculpture and installation, creating a visual universe marked by a radical eclecticism. In front of a series of works by Timoney, you may have the impression of being in a group exhibition, the styles, techniques and moods that define his work are that different: abstraction coexists with the most faithful photorealism, movement is accompanied by an almost meditative aesthetic, while a scholarly relationship with the history of art is combined with an understanding of the more contemporary, even trivial, aspects of our globalized and digital culture. This apparent incongruity of shapes and languages corresponds, in fact, to a rigorous and fully deliberate artistic strategy, at the heart of which we find a critique of the notion of “style” as the desire to explore art in all its aesthetic and conceptual potential. The photographic nature of much of Timoney’s experimentation with materials and media clearly shows a link to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, while Timoney’s interest in processes and materials, interpreted in their organic, temporal and changeable nature, finds an echo in European Informal and American Minimalist painting, and finally the ambiguity pursued among image and language evokes the surrealist tradition, as the visual and linguistic paradoxes of René Magritte, Max Ernst’s enigmatic quality of materials and shapes, the supreme illusion of Étant donnés by Marcel Duchamp. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first extensive monograph on the artist, published by Electa and edited by Alessandro Rabottini, with critical essays by Gavin Delahunty and Dominic Molon.

Curated by Alessandro Rabottini

Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina – Madre, Napoli
Via Settembrini 79
80139 Naples
Italy