QUEER, ME: THE CONFESSIONAL : A Debut Solo Show by Lucia Ferrari | It's 2020 For F*ck Sake – A Thirteen Artist, Back-to-Back Solo Exhibition Marathon
These works can be seen as an homage to Ferrari’s young self, embodying personal reflection by using the Pentimento painting method, through which she leaves remnants of previous marks on the canvas.
Lucia Ferrari’s body of work explores her sexuality and identity. These works can be seen as an homage to Ferrari’s young self, embodying personal reflection by using the Pentimento painting method, through which she leaves remnants of previous marks on the canvas. The paintings are created from memory, exploring the notion of recollection and how she remembers the past, along with jaded memory’s place in her consciousness today. This is the most honest body of work Ferrari has produced to date, which is demonstrated by the exhibition’s bold title (and its religious connotations): this body of work is unabashedly for her, while its themes remain thought-provoking to the general viewer. Amen.
Lucia Ferrari is an Italian artist raised in North London. While her working-class environment did not provide many opportunities to forge a path in art, she found a love for literature, history, and the arts in her school art classes; they provided a lifeline and purpose at a moment when she had begun to neglect her education and act out, in part due to the frustration of hiding her queer sexual identity during her catholic upbringing.
Now, having pursued her artistic practice, Ferrari recreates theatrical scenes from past memories, distorted through imagination and nostalgia. Her visual narratives continuously touch on her female queer identity and religious background, which can be found in the composition and subject matter within her works.
Guts Gallery and Soft Punk Magazine are proud to collaboratively present “It's 2020 For F*ck Sake”, a thirteen artist, back-to-back solo exhibition marathon, running from 24 September 2020 to 21 December 2020, first in a railway arch under Haggerston Station, and now with a return to lockdown, online through VR content.
Born from a desire to refuse the conditions of silence, paralysis, and erasure brought on by our current social and political climate, this exhibition series has been conceived as a means of exhibiting some of the most promising practitioners of the new generation, creating space for display, experimentation, and artistic ownership in an otherwise compromising market.
Actively aware of the scarcity of shows for underrepresented emerging artists, each artist exhibiting has been given full license over the space. However, this is an exhibition marathon founded in community — while each artist has a solo show, the broader ethos is one of collaboration, accessibility, progress, and collective shouldering of one another.
Once more returning to “lockdown” as of Thursday, 5th November, the remainder of the solo exhibitions will be launched and viewed through virtual reality, a viewing room via Guts’ upcoming Artlogic website and of course, Instagram. All of these platforms will be made live at the same time each week on the date the private views were due to take place. We would like viewers to engage with the works as you would in our physical space, curating an environment specific to each show and artist.
At a moment when the arts sector is on the brink of a major crisis, we are committed to continue putting our community first, paying fair wages, and providing sustained support for artists in any way we can.
