– MONITOR ROME
Opening: September 25th, 2020 | h 5–9 pm
with works by Tomaso De Luca, Patrick Angus, Gerry Bibby & Henrik Olesen, Gina Folly, Joanna Piotrowska, A.L. Steiner, Stan VanDerBeek
Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

– MONITOR PERETO
Opening: September 26th, 2020 | h 11am–4pm
Tomaso De Luca – Solo show
Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

We Don’t Like Your House Either! This exclamation kicks off the exhibition season at Monitor gallery in Rome, providing the title to a new project designed by Tomaso De Luca and curated by the duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. Featured artists include Patrick Angus, Gerry Bibby, Gina Folly, Henrik Olesen, Joanna Piotrowska, AL Steiner, and Stan VanDerBeek.

The exhibition will open on 25 September 2020 at Monitor’s Rome space, a prelude to both Tomaso De Luca’s solo show at the gallery’s Pereto branch opening the following day, as well as to his participation in the MAXXI BVLGARI Prize 2020. Stemming from a dialogue between the artist and the curators, We Don’t Like Your House Either! brings together works that are the result of synergies and collaborations.

Rather than focussing on individual artists, the show unravels debates that cross genders and generations, looking at the political resignification of living spaces. We Don’t Like Your House Either! appears to touch upon our shared experiences of the domestic confinement which has united us all during the recent pandemic, but saying this would be reductive. Confinement has invariably always concerned those who, in a more immediate and tragic way, cannot fit into the paradigms of a comfortable life – by exclusion, choice or both. The disadvantaged, the sick, the migrants, the exiled, the non-conforming, the poets, the artists. We Don’t Like Your House Either! is their expression of pride.

Two works have inspired this choir of voices. The first is Site by Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984), a three-channel movie which documents and multiplies the eponymous performance Robert Morris staged at the Surplus Dance Theatre in New York, in 1964. Morris’s face is covered by a mask designed by Jasper Johns, which, like a painting, flattens his features. The masked artist walks across a large stage, moving and bending sheets of plywood. Slightly larger than a human figure, the sheets can both contain the body as large canvases or conceal it like theatre curtains. In this game of planes, an iconic figure is suddenly revealed: Carolee Schneemann, nude, representing Edouard Manet’s Olympia. Manet, Johns, Schneemann, Morris, and VanDerBeek: all on stage, no one upstaged. Solid and supportive, they entrust each other with a wider vision of the world, which bravely ranges from painting to performance, from theatre to installation, from architecture to expanded cinema, from the original to a reproduction.

The second work is by Patrick Angus (1953–1992). A veritable trove of drawings and watercolours was recently discovered in the home of the artist’s mother in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Now seen in public, the works reveal the beginnings of the American artist before he was known as the Toulouse-Lautrec of the New York gay scene. There are no clubs, cinemas, or other gathering spots of the queer community which Angus depicted with extreme vitalism while it was ravaged by HIV during the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Rather, there are intimate, solitary, at times abstract landscapes, in which desire and urban density are sublimated and diluted.

PRESS RELEASE.

COMUNICATO STAMPA.

Harper’s BAZAAR. Alla galleria d’arte Monitor di Roma è in corso una mostra imperdibile

FLASH ART. “We Don’t Like Your House Either!” Monitor Gallery / Roma, Pereto by Marta Silvi

CURA Magazine. We Don’t Like Your House Either!

ARTRIBUNE. Case e confinamento. La mostra di Tomaso De Luca a Roma e Pereto. By Alessandra Mammì

DAILY LAZY. We Don’t Like Your House Either! at Monitor