Spinello Gallery presents Christina Pettersson

From Jan 16th through Feb 27th, 2010.

Spinello Gallery presents “Resurrection,” the solo exhibition by Miami’s female draftsman, Christina Pettersson. The Swedish born artist will undoubtedly wow you with her multidisciplinary exhibition featuring a suite of large-scale graphite drawings on paper, video, and sculpture. This will be Petterson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

We live in an age of diminishing returns. Even if you can manage a second coming, beware the form it takes. Pettersson explains, “Catholicism may have taught me that resurrection signaled a more glorious return than the original, but experience has done little to reinforce such a notion.” Instead she is haunted by a curious story she heard years ago, regarding the aftermath of Hiroshima. Only weeks after the explosion leveled the city, residents discovered that “The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew” (John Hersey, Hiroshima). Bright sticky blooms pushed through the rubble with disturbing disregard, proving once and for all that death, and not art, imitates life.

Pettersson continues, “The thing you bring back is never what you lost. When beauty is the aftermath of terrible violence, it is an aching reminder of what a fearful thing it is to love what death can touch. A resurrection is like a foreboding, a song that never rises from anywhere but the grave.”

But even this explanation is too simple. For among the strewn, charred wreckage of a bomb blast or a fire, rescuers will sometimes discover a whole pineapple or an orange where once a marketplace stood. Or in the decaying fibers of a doll a startlingly intact glass eye, like a diamond, will reveal itself. The viewer wonders, how is it that nothing in the history of the world has ever looked so beautiful before?  Suddenly the last story has no meaning, because every last breaks forward into a next. And even last things last forever.

Spinello Gallery
155 NE 38th Street. No. 101
Miami, FL 33137
www.spinellogallery.com

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