Almine Rech and Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA) are delighted to announce Hymn, Gerasimos Floratos first solo exhibition taking place in Picasso’s historic studio at Boisgeloup (Gisors, France).
Adjacent to Floratos’ Brussels show, the Boisgeloup exhibition includes many sculptures which relate to a selection of paintings. The title of the exhibition, Hymn, might surprise some at first, but the sculptures do have a sonic quality. They seem to be singing, shouting, or speaking. The artist leaves the interpretation of his works open, like the mouths of his figures. Floratos wholeheartedly believes that facial recognition is a crucial neural ability that allows us to survive in cities. The brain is capable of deciphering a fake smile from an honest one, a sincere word from irony. His paintings bear a similar ambiguity. However his sculptures are more than 3D translations of his paintings in the way that Baselitz, Lüpertz, or Appel sculptures live and exist on their own.Floratos chose clay: a playful, malleable medium that allows for mistakes. There can also be ugliness or sloppiness, which is what the funk ceramists from the West Coast brilliantly explored in the 1970s, reinventing the expressionist language in their own political way.
— Anne Dressen, curator at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.