Federico Bacher：Nature

Opening Date and Time: Friday 28th February, 6:00pm-9:00pm

Address: 240 East Beijing Road, Shanghai (Close to Middle Jiangxi Road) Press Release

February 2014, Shanghai: Naco Gallery and SuperPress are proud to announce their upcoming co-hosted art exhibition at SuperChina’s headquarters on 240 East Beijing Road, Shanghai. Featuring Argentinean artist Federico Bacher, who is currently an artist-in-residence at the famed Swatch Art Peace hotel, the exhibition will be spread across all three floors of the office building. The exhibition, titled “Nature,” features two main themes, “Nature” and “Energies,” with a range of artworks supporting the themes. The exhibition will officially launch on 28th February with a cocktail celebration and special one-night-only performance by Swedish sound artist Christian Berg, who especially created music of “forest atmosphere” to go with the exhibition.

“Nature” will showcase various mixed-media pieces, including a large 10-metre long ink “Moving Energy (Dragon)” on rice paper and several 5-metre long trees on rice paper suspended over the second-and-third floor atrium area. Other artworks featured include linocut woodcut prints of a horse’s profile, as well as hyper-scale portrait oil drawings on canvas.

Artist Statement

Even though we sometimes take Nature as a separate thing from ourselves, it is not so at all. It truly is what we really are. If we do separate ourselves from Nature, we lose our true essence. If we take nature as one thing, separate from us, then we essentially separate our fundamental existence.

Taking down a tree is taking down ourselves. A tree and a human being are made from exactly the same 4 simple elements, carbon, nitrogen, helium and oxygen, which were created in the universe from the very beginning. We are intimately more related to them than what we think. This is just a chemical explanation, but if we perform the difficult task to slow down for a while, and see a tree as it really is, touch it, embrace it, feel it… we will understand that it is just as alive, active, and vibrating as we are.

Human violence towards Nature is the origin of our own violence to ourselves. A strong lack of love. An unconscious self-hatred.

The beauty of art is highly related to Nature, because Nature creates beauty, in the most open and universal concept of it. The theory of evolution is a demonstration of it. A lot has been said about the concern we should be having for nature, and the damage it is going through, however, I think that the change should start not because of an extinguishing resource, but because of caring and love for our true home and for ourselves.

Energies Series:

Energies of existence. No mater.

The energies of what it was.

A trace of life left behind.

What remains, is the aftermath of a moment.

Nature:

Trees disappeared for making pulp, tree paste.

Forests are destroyed to make paper out of them.

Now they become trees again, through art and ink.

In my case I was lucky enough to make out of paper some trees again.

Federico Bacher: Visual Artist

I did five years of academia at the National Academy of Fine Arts of Argentina. When I finished, instead of following through with graduate school, I decided to go to Florence to continue my studies there. A self-described Fanatic of the Renaissance and Michaelangelo, I studied there for two years, on my own, assisting permanently to museums and monuments of Florence with my student card at the Istituto Satatale D’Arte di Firenze. I was a student and assistant to great sculptors and artists like Aurelio Macchi, Ruben Locaso and Magda Frank. Artists of older generations in which the craft, work and love of their work were essential, and that is what I learned. Now I’m Head Professor in the IUNA, Argentina University of Arts

As an artist I am essentially a nature lover. I think to love Nature is to love ourselves. The gap that has been generated between man and Nature is huge. Loving it would retrieve us much good. I always appreciate having dedicated my life to art. It gives me the ability to communicate with nature and with people in a very pure form, where certain contaminants do not enter.

I call my studio, “the temple”, and I think this summarizes everything. This “temple”

is often in divine order and sometimes in great chaos, such as life and the

universe, and so I live in it and enjoy it.

I use a lot of intuition and the unconsciousness, I think there’s something in us that knows more about us than ourselves. And that mystery is beautiful as is life itself.

For more inquiries please contact:

Jingting Ma

E: jingting.ma@superpress.com.cn

T: +86 21 64 66 6161

M: +86 136 3633 0635

Federico Bacher

E: federicobacher@gmail.com

M: +86 131 2774 7635