Anthony Giannini: Mess Head
September 15 – October 27, 2018
Opening reception: Saturday, September 15th 6 – 8 pm
Mess Head is the gestation of the archive
A place for the sacred and the static image
buried in the deep sleep of abstraction
It is an unruly passion of collecting
sorting thru, positioning, of butting-up against
Silent haptics of detained immigrants in an iniquitous landscape
Mess Head is an accumulation of slivers
The dizziness, the anxiety and the sense of being overwhelmed
It is the curdling of post 9-11 American identity
The refusal of all of this with application of brush
To dig behind the image, to repeat the image, to abstract the image
It is a cathartic negotiation between body and mind.
(Studio notes, 2018)
Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to present Anthony Giannini: Mess Head, his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Consisting of new work from his Remnant and Table Top Still Life series, Giannini uses gesture, appropriation, screen-printing, and color theory to create intensely layered paintings. The artist, who lives in Detroit and The Bronx, takes a polyphonic approach in orchestrating imagery surrounding notions of identity, religion, and politics.
Giannini uses a complex improvisational process that includes still lifes, image manipulation software, screen-printing and stenciling; and he moves between both physical and digital modes of production. Interweaving the personal, political, ordinary and the sacred through a rigorous formal complexity, the paintings in Mess Head live between representation and abstraction.
So much crap in my head
So many rubbishy facts,
So many half-baked
theories and opinions….
So much political swill.
So much crap, Yet
so much I don’t know
and would dearly like to
I recognize nearly none
of the bird songs of dawn-
All I’m sure of is
the maddening who,
who-who of the doves…
(from C.K. Williams, “Doves,” 2003)
The paintings in “Mess Head” are a visual response to the inundation of repetitive imagery and doublespeak in digital culture. His work is an effort to transform these temporary flickers into visual bird songs, to extract a gestural poetry from a rapidly changing environment. He balances his internal and personal histories with the legacy of his family against the onslaught of dizzying data that arrives with daily life.
Anthony Giannini will attend the opening reception on September 15th
Anthony Giannini (USA, b. 1984) was born in Boulder, Colorado. He received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2012) and BFA from Michigan State University (2007). He was recently included in Selections (curated by Larry-Ossei Mensah) at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NYC (2018); and has had solo and group shows at Harmony Murphy Gallery, Los Angeles; Pace Gallery, New York, NY; SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Michigan; The Bruce High Quality Foundation, NYC, NY; and Karst & Gorse, Hudson Valley, NY. Giannini was awarded the MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation, Providence, RI (2013). He lives with his wife, artist Amna Asghar, and their daughter in Detroit and The Bronx.
