Ernesto Tatafiore
Instrumente
Jan 14th – Mar 12th, 2014
LEVY Galerie is pleased to present the exhibition Instrumente with the latest series of works by the Italian artist Ernesto Tatafiore (*1943). Within the oeuvre of the Neapolitan the viewer is confronted with a unique poetic language of thematic paintings. These refer to the European intellectual and social history as well as to its underlying concept of duality related to peoples` being and doing. At the hands of his visually and colorfully intense pictorial world, the artist – as moralist and utopian – recounts the contradictory instruments of human existence: virtue and vice, liberty and constraint, Eros and Thanatos, nature and culture, mind and body. Herwig Guratzsch emphasizes the “exuberant sense of imagination” of the artist: “By force of this faculty he continues to move mountains, to make volcanoes erupt, to distort fish, to let vessels sink, and to delight in beautiful breasts and the erotic charms of ravishing women.” However, in this show “one is confronted with a changed, indeed new Tatafiore.” Because the artist “unhesitatingly extends his arsenal of aesthetic instruments, unconcerned whether or not passages might have a retarding effect. He gathers together his collected studio utensils. Yet these days he is reducing their sparkling diversity, now placing more emphasis on the individual item.”
Ernesto Tatafiore, psychoanalyst, painter, illustrator and object artist was born in Naples in 1943, where he still lives and works. His oeuvre is one of the most considerable and eclectic throughout Italian art and is represented in numerous international museum collections.
On the occasion of the exhibition a catalogue is published at Kerber Publisher containing an essay by Prof. Dr. Herwig Guratzsch.