press release only in german

Taking its title from the homonymous short story authored by American novelist John Cheever, O Youth and Beauty! presents recent works by three artists, Anna Bjerger (lives and works in Älmhult, Sweden), Louis Fratino (lives and works in New York City, USA) and Waldemar Zimbelmann (lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany). Sharing an intimistic use of figurative painting, the three artists engage with a diaristic approach within their practice in which the merging of realism and illusion generate unexpected revelations from mundane, daily-life scenes. Anna Bjerger's paintings depart from found, anonymous photographs to chart indefinable figures in unclear scenarios. Mostly depicted in isolation and with an evocative painterly language, her characters capture moments of stillness and psychological concentration. Louis Fratino's emotional realism interprets male characters manifesting a faith in the dailiness of lived experience. The artists' drawings and paintings merge fiction and reality by portraying friends and lovers, together with people never met. Waldemar Zimbelmann’s characters appear to be subjected to a metamorphic process, wherein animals, children, natural landscapes and domestic interiors are superimposed in anthropomorphic evanescence.

The accompanying publications comprise a series of five conversations with the artists, authored by Giuseppe Di Salvatore, Luigi Fassi, Emanuela Manca and Alessandro Salice.

This projects are realised with the contribution of the Sardinian Region, the Province of Nuoro and the Fondazione di Sardegna.