UNITED STATES / MIAMI BEACH : LAURENT GRASSO. PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN

until Sunday February 12 2012
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue
33139 Miami Beach
United States

T : +1 305 673 7530
info@bassmuseum.org
www.bassmuseum.org

Grasso selected historic works from the Renaissance and Baroque collection of the museum to create a dialogue with his own works from a wide range of media, all of which investigate a notion of history.

The solo exhibition of works by Paris-based artist Laurent Grasso builds on his reflections on the Renaissance, a time when the fields of science and the arts actively informed one another.

For example, the exhibition includes a series of intricate paintings titled Studies into the past. These paintings incorporate select imagery meticulously reproduced from historic paintings while simultaneously integrating depictions of miraculous phenomena such as eclipses, floating rocks and the northern lights. Other works central to the exhibition include a series of neons inspired by Grasso's interest in Galileo Galilei. One of these works, 1610 (2011), was made especially for the exhibition; it transforms a sketch by Galileo of a star constellation into neon, referencing the Vatican's recent rehabilitation of the scientist. Through placing these works alongside paintings from the 15th century, Grasso provocatively alludes to literal and figurative connections between the past and present.

Laurent Grasso was born in 1972 in Mulhouse, France and currently lives and works between New York and Paris. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, as well as of group shows and biennials across Europe, Asia and the Americas including Manifesta 8, the Third Moscow Biennale and Sharjah Biennial. As the 2008 Laureate of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Grasso presented a special exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou (2009).