Making Beauty & The Third Paradise

Last year I saw Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva's 'Fragility' for Fabrica Gallery, Brighton. This installation forms the breathtaking entrance to her first major UK show at the Djanogly Gallery Nottingham. The exhibition entitled Making Beauty also includes the first UK showing of ‘Haruspex’ commissioned by the Vatican for the Venice Biennale, 2015.

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva is a site-specific installation artist working across the varied media of sculpture, installation, video and sound, photography and architectural interventions. Her materials range from the unusual to the ordinary, from the ephemeral to the precious; they include organic materials, foodstuffs and precious metals.

Making Beauty is a new body of work made in collaboration with academics in medical departments of the universities of Nottingham, East Anglia and London, introducing highly regarded medical research activity to a wider public. Her work has been informed by their work on nutrition, healthy diet, our gut, and the development of highly specialised - invisible to the eye - manufactured parts providing solutions to medical problems. The sculptures reveal the fragility of our bodies and reflect the delicate nature of these medical components. The work has been supported by a research grant from the Wellcome Trust.

For summer 2016, Fabrica is presenting a work by internationally-renowned Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, a leading light of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s. The work features a labyrinth constructed from cardboard which leads to a mirror with a symbol laid out in coins.

The symbol, the infinity sign altered to add a central loop represents The Third Paradise. According to Pistoletto’s manifesto written in 2003, The Third Paradise seeks to reconcile the conflict between the first and second paradises of nature and human artifice. This conflict is leading toward global destruction but the third paradise offers a solution, a resolution that will save the planet and humanity.

The Third Paradise is the new myth that leads everyone to take personal responsibility at this momentous juncture. The idea of the Third Paradise is to lead artifice—that is, science, technology, art, culture and political life—back to the Earth, while engaging in the reestablishment of common principles and ethical behaviour.

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Moby - Everything That Rises / The Last Day (Poordream Remix).

Giacomo Manzù: Sculptor and Draughtsman

A true great of twentieth-century sculpture, Giacomo Manzù is renowned for his delicate and moving work, focusing on portraiture and religious imagery.

As sensitive to line as he was to form, his drawings exhibit the same restrained, sinuous qualities familiar to us from his more celebrated bas-reliefs.

Aside from a few evening classes, Manzù was completely self-taught. He first started working with wood during his military service in the late 1920s, and within a decade his sculpture was being exhibited to widespread public acclaim.

During his career Manzù produced many notable works, including a series of bronze bas-reliefs about the death of Jesus Christ, portraits of his wife Inge Schabel and her sister Sonja, and the Gate of Death for St Peter's Basilica. His last major commission was a 6m tall public sculpture in New York, which was inaugurated in 1989.

Pope John XXIII commissioned Manzù to make his portrait bust, and despite all the artist's misgivings, there developed between them a warm and deeply significant friendship which drove Manzù to achieve the remarkable bronze Doors of Death for St. Peter's in Rome - the first new doors for the cathedral for 500 years.'

The door 'has large modelled panels that depict the deaths of Mary and Christ, as well as lesser panels that show the deaths of saints and ordinary people. Vatican officials were wary of Manzù’s communist politics and criticized his refusal to temper his unflinching depiction of death and human suffering with a more spiritual theme. Particularly shocking was his depiction of a cardinal looking at a man being crucified up side-down, a reference to the execution of fascists after WWII.'

Commissioning Manzù is an example of the policy advocated in France by Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey and in Austria by Otto Mauer of seeking to revive Christian art by appealing to the independent masters of the time. An Artist and the Pope by Curtis Bill Pepper is a fascinating expose of the difficulties encountered, even at the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church and despite the significant support of Pope John, Don Giuseppe de Luca and Monsignor Loris Capovilla, in pursuing this policy.

Giacomo Manzù: Sculptor and Draughtsman will be at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art from 15 January – 3 April 2016. This exhibition focuses on examples of both his sculptural and sketching practice, revealing the similarities between the two.

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Bear's Den - Isaac.