Oct 13 - Nov 10

Dalya Luttwak & Arrigo Musti

ORIGINS October 13 - November 10

Opening Reception: Oct 13 5-7pm

Watergate Gallery in Washington, DC brings together the works of artists Arrigo Musti (Rome and Palermo, Italy) and Dalya Luttwak (Washington, DC).

Dalya Luttwak and Arrigo Musti come from different cultures and experiences, speak of worlds that seem distant from one another, work with sculpture and painting, and expand their work towards the space of life through environmental art and design, but at the bottom of their poetics there hides a common vision, the need to find a secret link with a primary nucleus, an original foundation suspended between perception and psyche, nature and culture.

Roots and classicism, ancient sculpture and the contemporary installation, land and water: two artists who use seemingly different languages, but with the instruments of contemporary life speak in a similar way of a possible return to the origin, of a deep descent towards archetypal images that unite a personal and collective dimension.

Dalya Luttwak finds her reference space in nature, in a taut dialogue with the plant world that the artist investigates by reversing its coordinates, showing what cannot normally be seen of plants, but which is the vital basis of those plants: those roots that the artist expands and transforms into poetic elements that broaden out into space as vital textures that combine strength and lightness, plastic power and a lyrical feeling of the world. Thus the great plant architectures of Dalya Luttwak expand and rise and take possession of a new space, entering into a harmonious relationship with the sky, architecture and light, and transform into splendid presences and a symbolic paraphrase of a return to the sources of being, the accomplishment of an inner journey that overcomes time in search of lost roots.

Arrigo Musti also makes a personal descent towards the origin, finding the origins of classicism that joins together the whole Mediterranean basin, between Greece, Magna Graecia, Hellenistic koine and Roman empire, an ancient world that still lives in the secret of the genetic code of apparently different and distant cultures, peoples and geographical areas.

Like a time diver, Musti then descends into the sea of centuries to recover images and shapes in which we can still reflect ourselves, working on ancient sculptures, but also on the Sicilian baroque, not in a nostalgic sense, but with absolutely topical painting, with an intervention that often dialogues with industrial design, with acid and vibrant colors, with liquid painting that consciously uses dripping not guided by the unconscious but by the desire to rediscover the roots of a formal nucleus.
 Musti’s color thus becomes the preferred medium of this journey, rippling and solidifying metaphorically in compositional structures suspended between geometry and gesture, where ancient faces re-emerge from the deep and rediscover their features, giving meaning and fulfillment to his descent into the depths of the psyche in search of a forgotten origin.

Nov 17 - Dec 4

Wainright Dawson  3-D

Mix-Media Art Returns

Dec 8 - Jan 12, 2019

Antonia Ramis Miguel

January 19 - Feb 23

TBA - Group Theme Show

March 3 - 30

TBA

April 6 - May 4

Anamario Hernandez

May 11 - June 15

Tisha Balesi Wood