On the occasion of the 65th anniversary of Missoni, the brand’s creative director Angela Missoni presents Model! Pleasure! Artist! Alive!, a personal exhibition of Cheryl Donegan, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. The exhibition will open on October 25th as part of the Surface Conversion project, the artistic platform that makes use of the spaces and floor areas of the Missoni boutique on Madison Avenue in New York.
 
Model! Pleasure! Artist! Alive!, Cheryl Donegan’s exhibition curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi for Missoni in New York, builds upon a cycle of events that started with Jonas Mekas’ personal exhibition last year and were dedicated to the dynamism of New York’s arts scene as seen from the perspective of different generations. The shop areas burst with this vitality creating new forms of dialogue between arts, fashion and reality.

Right these intersections serve as a foundation for the work of Cheryl Donegan, who is pioneering the post-digital aesthetics and has been releasing lo-fi images for more than twenty years, causing short-circuits between performing arts, videomaking and painting. Immediately adopted into the canon of the feminist art movement with videos such as Gag, Kiss My Royal Irish Ass and Head — shown at the Venice Biennale in 1993 — the artist uses a number of do-it-yourself, analog and non-analog techniques to turn objects and symbols of the metropolitan life into abstract art. Her works have been exhibited at major international stages such as the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, New Museum, Tang Museum of Art, and Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon.

For Missoni, Cheryl Donegan absorbs the colors, forms and patterns of minor urban landscapes and recreates them into an irresistible psychedelia made of acid tones. Air conditioners’ grids ruthlessly painted by graffiti writers all over New York, beauty shops’ windows in Harlem, out-of-town car breakers, and broken glasses from old PC monitors together with toy computer graphics, they all become personal visual obsessions that will eventually be transformed into charming abstract paintings.
«In the works by Cheryl Donegan, images and shapes of little value are re-used in new compositions with an extremely high emotional capital», the curatorial duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi said, adding that «Cheryl has been one of the first artists who realized that an ecology of images is needed at least as much as an ecology of things in the 21st century».

On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening ceremony, the catalogue GRLZ + VEILS. Cheryl Donegan, co-produced by Aspen Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum Houston and Kunsthalle Zürich, will be presented for the first time.

11/2018
AS IF MAG °   
Missoni and Donegan present Model! Pleasure! Artist! Alive!

11/2018
AVENUE MAGAZINE °   
Missoni family values

11/2018
THE CUT °
Check Out a Wild Artist at the Missoni Store

11/2018
KUBA PARIS
Cheryl Donegan @ Missoni NYC

11/2018
VOGUE
Il new-sciamanesimo di Cheryl Donegan conquista la Boutique Missoni a New York