PREVIEW: Anna Conway-Instructions: The Whale
Described as a storyteller, Conway creates paintings that depict narratives in which, in her own words, “ordinary people are suddenly confronted by forces greater than themselves.” Growing up in Foxboro, Massachusetts (home of the New England Patriots’ NFL stadium) and being constrained to return repeatedly after high school due to lack of finances, Conway felt trapped in the town.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Collezione Maramotti Archive
Anna Conway’s approach to representation is precise and methodical, inventive and deliberate. She works in loose gestural forms at the start of a painting, but her forms gradually become increasingly focused and controlled. The juxtaposition of her physical practice and conceptualization of fantastical vistas or scenarios is present in Trance (2006), in which a man collecting satellite antennas on a rooftop is captured lost in thought while gazing at the reflection of blue sky in a puddle. With each stone painstakingly created, the work is a discomforting labor of meditational practice and care. Collezione Maramotti presents “Instructions: The Whale” (2023), a painting by American artist Anna Conway that recently entered the collection and will be exhibited to the public for the first time. After the painter’s first exhibition in Europe, held in 2016 in Collezione Maramotti’s Pattern Room, this intimate new exhibition marks an emblematic stage in Conway’s artistic investigation, launching a series of works “(Instructions)” that explores the idea of animals and their trainers set against the backdrop of a green screen. The depiction of the screen, a device used in commercial film and television production which makes it possible to isolate a subject being filmed and reproduce it on a different background, reflects her ongoing fascination with the insignificance of human beings in relation to the environment around them, which is often both magnificent and terrifying. Green screens are also perfectly relevant to Conway’s practice, which constructs an image through the successive phases of what could be seen as a personal narrative: as if writing a book or shooting a film, she adds or removes elements from the scene over the course of a long working process. Alongside the new painting, the exhibition presents a video of about fifty sequential photographs through which Conway documented her progression towards the final work. These informal shots of its development show the evolution of the relationship between artist and image as it gradually came into being. Guided by method and intuition, by close observation of reality and by pure imagination, Conway’s starting point in the creation of “The Whale” was the concept of “rewilding”: the recovery of wilderness areas through the reintroduction of native species to their habitats—and, in a broader sense, the relinquishment of human control over nature. Always passionately interested in the animal kingdom and in potential ways of communicating with it, the artist’s meditation has expanded here to include animal trainers, the environment and herself, drawing connections to childhood memories and to Melville’s literary genius in “Moby Dick”. Conway’s paintings, which are animated by different intentions and perspectives, and always spring from a sound that the artist has taken as her point of departure, represent questions about people and places that are familiar, yet inscrutable. “The Whale”, in which the main characters are a whale and its trainer, is a cinematic, supernatural, dramatic, even biblical work. Despite the highly dynamic iconography—with a stormy ocean and wind swelling the green sails/canvases of a precarious stage set, a wave-battered cliff and a drone filming the action—the scene seems elusive, distilled to an instant, caught in a freeze-frame that is imbued with mystery.
Photo: Anna Conway, Instructions: The Whale, 2023, oil on canvas, © Anna Conway, Photo: Shoot Art, New York, NY
Info: Collezione Maramotti , Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia, Italy, Duration: 15/6-15/9/2024, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 14:30-18:30, Sat-Sun 10:30-18:30, www.collezionemaramotti.org/
