In the Project Room of CAMERA - Italian Center for Photography, the solo exhibition of Irene Kung (Bern, 1958) entitled Monuments , curated by the director of the Turin institute, Walter Guadagnini, will be inaugurated on Thursday 30 May at 6.00 pm. Starting from the juxtaposition of images belonging to two previous photographic series, Le città invisibili (2012) and Trees (2014), Kung makes a visual selection that recomposes an introspective and social investigation of the landscape, be it urban, archaeological or natural. For the Swiss author, these elements are pure foundations of vision which, stripped of the visual disturbance generated by the forms of progress and human neglect, present themselves to the viewer as stately portraits emerging from the darkness. In the eighteen large-format works exhibited on this occasion, trees, ancient ruins and contemporary architecture take on a saving character, they become contemporary monuments which - thanks to the power of aesthetics and the strength of the image - cancel time and order chaos with their constructive harmony.
Trained in the pictorial field, Kung has adopted photography as the privileged medium of her artistic production for about a decade, exploiting her training not only to embellish the lyrical and emotional component of her artistic research, but also the gestural and instinctive one. The essentiality of the shots and the ability to bring out his subjects from the darkness, in fact, express a stylistic and conceptual closeness to the Italian pictorial Renaissance: his works highlight the rational desire to identify new possible paths for a sustainable future and renewed attention to the balance between human and natural. At the same time, Kung's compositions highlight by contrast the ambiguity of urbanization and human neglect, making a subtle uneasiness emerge from the beauty. Describing suffering through a refined and dreamlike representation is - declares Kung - an attempt to generate a new meaning starting from the perceptions of an emotional experience, it is an abstraction that leads me from the darkest areas to the meditative dimension, up to the unconscious spaces of the soul.
Irene Kung was born in Bern in 1958, lives and works in Rome. After studying painting in Switzerland, he expanded his research by including photography in his artistic repertoire. Her work has been published in international magazines such as "AD", "The Sunday Times Magazine" and "The New York Times Magazine" and was exhibited as part of "ParisPhoto" in 2010. She was invited by the organizing committee of EXPO 2015 to participate with an exhibition of photographs of fruit trees at the "Cluster of Fruit and Vegetables". He has also exhibited at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2019), at Forma - International Center of Photography in Milan (2015, 2013, 2010), at the BOZAR in Brussels and in other important exhibition venues in Italy and abroad. His book Le città invisibili (2012) was published by Contrasto, accompanied by texts by Francine Prose and Ludovico Pratesi. Always with Contrasto he also published the book Trees (2014).