Marco Maggi

The gallery is pleased to present The Ted Turner Collection, Marco Maggiʼs fourth solo show in New York. The Ted Turner Collection refers to the way information is framed and packaged. The exhibition consists of seven framed works from the series Complete Coverage accompanied by a floor installation of 50Turner Boxes, as well as a cabinet of drawings.
The Ted Turner Collection documents operations on the back of the following seven artists: Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Kasimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and Robert Ryman. In this new series of cuts on paper, Marco Maggi operates a minute dissection by cutting, folding and fragmenting iconic paintings of art history. The works present a homeopathic display of color surfaces creating hundreds of “breaking news”, exclusive live reports from an invisible reality, hidden on the other side of the canvas. Great painters become the unaware backers of his micro appropriations of color.
“From CNN to the DNA, I focus my attention on reading surfaces without the minor hope to get informed. Everyday, we are condemned to know more and understand less. This antiseptic process prefigures the first global semiotic indigestion. Reality collapses when one tries to portray an ocean by depicting drop after drop of water”. (Marco Maggi).
These multiple operations under the blade of an Xacto knife generate the same kind of blindness one experiences in front of the evening news. For instance, in Complete Coverage on Jasper Johns, the American flag is turned into a sampler of fragmented and dysfunctional information. On the floor, and corresponding to each Complete Coverage piece on the wall, there are sets of seven paper structures enclosed in Plexiglas boxes. They stand in a grid arrangement like TV monitors, hermetically sealed books or sterile tanks containing inaccessible information.
Marco Maggi lives and works in Montevideo, Uruguay. His work has been shown internationally since 1998. Previous exhibitions include: The Fifth Gwangju Biennial in Korea (2004), The San Juan Triennial in Puerto Rico (2004), The VIII Havana Biennial in Cuba (2003), The 25th Sao Paulo Biennial (2002), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2001). Upcoming projects include: The Ted Turner Collection in the spring issue of Cabinet Magazine; Vitamin D, the upcoming survey of contemporary drawing to be published by Phaidon press. Heʼs preparing gallery exhibitions in Italy, Houston and San Francisco and just completed a project for the Daros foundation in Zurich, Switzerland.