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February 17, 2007- March 17, 2007
Reception: February 17, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Eva and Franco Mattes
Postmasters Gallery
459 W 19th StPostmasters Gallery is very pleased to present "13 Most Beautiful Avatars," a portrait series by EVA and FRANCO MATTES (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG).
The Matteses have been living in the virtual world, Second Life, for over a year, exploring its terrain and interacting with its peculiar inhabitants. The result of their "video-game flanerie" is a series of portraits, entitled "13 Most Beautiful Avatars." Not unlike Warhol's entourage of stars, captured in the "13 Most Beautiful Boys" and "13 Most Beautiful Women" portrait series, the Matteses' "13 Most Beautiful Avatars" captures the most visually dynamic and celebrated "stars" of Second Life. The portraits reflect Second Life aesthetics, featuring the bright colors, "artificial" light, broad flat areas, 3D shapes, and surreal perspectives that are typical of this virtual world. Overall, the series draws on the technological developments which allow the creation of alternate identities within simulated worlds. Despite the relative newness of using video game-derived source materials, the avatars' icons recall questions common to earlier eras of portraiture, including the cultural and psychological context of the images, and the relationships between high art and subculture, between contemporary art and "traditional" art forms, and between art and life itself.
The project was created during the artists' stay at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. The Matteses are the recipients of 2006 Premio New York Prize for most promising young Italian Artists. A portfolio of prints produced by Jean-Yves Noblet Contemporary Prints will also available.
Born in 1976, Eva and Franco Mattes, (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG) have been pioneers in the net.art movement remixing famous digital art pieces and performing Life Sharing: a real-time digital self portrait, during which they submitted to satellite surveillance for an entire year. In the last decade they have created unpredictable mass-scale performances staged outside the traditional art venues and involving an unaware audience, where truth and falsehood mix to the point of being indistinguishable. They created and released the code for a computer virus, erected fake architectural heritage signs, run media campaigns for non-existent action movies (United We Stand), and even convinced the entire populace of Vienna that Nike had purchased the city's historic Karlsplatz and was about to rename it "Nikeplatz". Their controversial performances, often bordering on illegality, have been widely discussed in the media earning them the name "Bonnie and Clyde of Contemporary Art". Their works have been shown internationally including: Collection Lambert, Avignon; Fondazione Pitti Discovery, Florence, Lentos Museum of Modern Art, Linz; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; ICC, Tokyo; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt and Galeria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento.
For more information on the Second Life project and an interview with the artists: http://www.0100101110101101.org
Art Reviews of 13 Most Beautiful Avatars
| New York Times March 9, 2007 | Roberta Smith | "...What’s remarkable is the eerie effectiveness of these works as paintings in the nonvirtual world. With their flat colors, slightly blocky features and assertive hair, these images of men and women exude a sexy artifice that is both seductive and a parody of seductiveness. They also evoke Ann Lee, the manga character featured in videos by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, and the portraits of Alex Katz and Richard Phillips...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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