The FallaniVenezia – Center for the Arts will open a unique exhibition featuring Slovenian artist Gasper Jemec.
Terra Nuova is a platform for dialogue and discussion, where diverse relationships can be built and fostered. The project consists of an “island” floor installation made of wood and moss roughly 5 x 7 meters in dimension. Jemec conceived of it initially as a series of drawings he made while working for Salamatina Gallery in Long Island, New York, in 2009. It wasn’t until now that he has had the opportunity to realize the work in space.
Jemec titled his project Terra Nuova, or New Land, because he wanted to put forward a vision of what it might be like to discover a new landscape. Jemec also wanted to play off of Venice’s island environment; it is a city made up of many man-made islands, and also of existing ones in the lagoon. Terra Nuova’s form mimics the shape of the Venice Lagoon. As for the installation’s use of materials, they’re all natural. The artist’s choice of using the moss as the main material is symbolically important. In Venice, it’s found everywhere in the lagoon and it represents the pure power of nature, which persists and resists human development and encroachment.
Gasper Jemec had a comeback of sorts in 2003, when he showed some work at the Venice Biennale; he hadn’t exhibited there in twelve years. Venice is very domestic to Jemec, especially Fallani Venezia, where Terra Nuova will premiere this May. The 16th-Century building is almost like home to the artist, since he went to the Biennale often as a child and his father collaborated with the Fallani Studio in the 1960s. Since then, Fallani Venezia studio has worked on projects with many established international artists, such as the American, Shepard Fairey.
Gasper Jemec is an artist whose work is both timeless and unique. Jemec’s multi-media work is both sensual and cerebral, and he blends technology with tradition in order to manipulate texture, color and light in new and stimulating ways. Jemec constantly alters his materials and techniques to imbue each phase of his career with freshness and mystery. Jemec often works in several disciplines at one time, freely moving from painting to sculpture, photography and installation. Rather than following trends, Jemec works intuitively, impulsively following his own ideas as they come. Jemec believes in the power of purely visual impulses.
Gasper Jemec was born in Slovenia in 1975. The son of a painter, he became aware of his own creativity at a precocious age and devoted his life to cultivating a restless and experimental nature. He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where he studied painting and sculpture. Jemec also did graduate work in painting at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in America. As a Herder scholarship winner, he further trained in sculpture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. His work has been widely exhibited in solo and group shows all over the world, from Slovenia to America, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom and Sweden. He has lived and worked in Los Angeles, New York, Indiana, Vienna, Hamburg, Sakaide, Valencia, Moscow, London, and currently resides in his native country.
