For his third exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery, Italian artist Maurizio Pellegrin will present The Monkey Room, a mixed media installation that incorporates altered found objects, photographs and drawing.
Following on three installations in Venice, Italy in November and December of 1997 (the chinese room, the italian room, the african room), Pellegrin’s The Monkey Room investigates the talismanic properties this animal has possessed in the cultural, religious, and folkloric histories of a realm of nations through different ages.
Of particular interest to pellegrin is the position of the monkey as a metaphorical “bridge” and the dualities that this relation of man possesses - between the human and the divine, between life and death, and between instinct and intelligence.
Pellegrin , a seasoned “collector” of objects, transforms through context and juxtaposition a carefully studied plethora of works, adding to them a sense of romance and mystery through his “signatures” of wrapping and his fascination with numerology - imbuing his work with a sense of a magical ordering.
Maurizio Pellegrin recently visited Japan for the first time, and was struck by that culture’s interest in presentation, particularly as it differed from the artist’s own western european concepts - Pellegrin’s wall-oriented and free-standing works are presented in a highly formal “framing” system reminiscent of Grand European painting of the 18th and 19th centuries.