I AM ME – Exhibition by Saskia Pintelon from 23 November

Friday, 18 November 2016 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Belgium-born Saskia Pintelon moved to Sri Lanka in 1982. Her paintings are very personal and yet encompass a wide range of universal concerns in strong, layered images. Inspired by local and universal issues, stories from the gut and the heart, politics and day-to-day concerns, her body of works interprets the collective human experience, environment and the cycle of life with intimate and personal preoccupations.

In 2016 Pintelon’s work was presented at the Dhaka Art Summit in an exhibition titled ‘The Missing One’ curated by Nada Raza as well as by Saskia Fernando Gallery at Art Dubai. The ‘Missing One’ exhibition traveled to Norway later in the year and is currently being exhibited at OCA Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo. The artist has exhibited throughout Asia and Europe and is represented in both Singapore by Yavuz Fine Art and in Sri Lanka by Saskia Fernando Gallery.

In this exhibition, the artists first solo in Sri Lanka since 2012, the series of work titled ‘I Am Me’ consists of smaller works that are part of an ongoing project whereby the artist revisits her own work in the published, printed leporello ‘The Book of Faces’ whereby she customizes her own ‘Faces’ and turns them into ‘Other Faces’. Pintelon’s idiosyncratic obsession to alter, destroy, subvert her own work in printed version with collages and mixed media and thereby give birth to thousands of new images has led her down a path untraveled by any other in the history of art.

The large mixed, monochrome, mixed media collages are a continuation of the work on ‘The Book of Faces’. They do have a new approach as the artist begins with a blank page and then adds on. Collage in this size proved more challenging as collected from various sources is invariably smaller and so she had to resort to other ways of mixing and matching. The themes are some of her recurring ones related to age, beauty, gender, internet use, love, obsession with fitness, isolation, loneliness and the balance between the public and the private us.

The exhibition will be open daily to the public from 23 November to 20 December at the Saskia Fernando Gallery, 41 Horton Place, Colombo 7. Tel 0117429010. The artist’s work will also be exhibited at the Colombo Art Biennale JDA Perera Gallery exhibit, alongside which a publication will be launched at the gallery during the biennale.