Giorgio Sadotti: From Navels to Nipples Henry Moore
Exhibition
2nd May 2006 - 3rd June 2006
Gallery 4
Image taken from the book 'From Navels to Nipples Henry Moore'
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist
Giorgio Sadotti has drawn from the library of the Henry Moore Institute to create a book centred on the making of a circular hole (navel to closest nipple radius). The book will be launched in London in April, and in May an accompanying exhibition is on show in Gallery 4 at the Henry Moore Institute.
The exhibition consists of what is not in the book: the circles which are removed from the original books’ pages. While the book itself is the ‘frame’ - the cut-out holes showing through to the adjoining pages - and the show is the ‘part’ - the ‘whole’ can still be found on the library shelves, in the form of the 23 titles which served as Sadotti’s source material.
These books inevitably focus on the body, as so many art books do, and in particular on the female nude. Individual artists who feature strongly include Bellmer, Dali, Allen Jones, Yves Klein and Rodin, alongside some of the major recent surveys of the body in art.
Sadotti’s book - From Navels to Nipples Henry Moore - will be on sale at the Institute during and after the exhibition. Its meticulous compilation - which involves the ‘skewering’ of a sequence of carefully gradated circles, centred on the navel - is belied by its humorous collaged aspect. In fact, however, the mathematical precision which underlies the project as a whole is very much part of Sadotti’s approach to art and. By taking a single motif, gathering it up and organising its display according to a new formal principle, he re-invents his subject matter and re-orders the world.
Giorgio Sadotti lives and works in London. He has recently exhibited at PS1 in New York, at Washington State University, and at Platform in London. Projects have included his curators’ dinner-party in London and classical violinists playing police sirens in New York. He continues to work with both visual and aural materials, mixing categories and expectations. This frequently involves compressing or stretching his material according to new physical or temporal parameters, as with From Navels to Nipples Henry Moore.