Project Description
Barbara Nahmad ( Milan 1967 ), Jumping rope
Oil on canvas cm 130 x 110.
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«I started to “subtract”, looking for a cleanliness and essentiality that I needed: I gave up the enamel, which connoted my artistic style. I deduced the cleansing of the sign […]. I subtracted the incisiveness of the perfect form. I rarely paint the subjects, I lightened the canvas, which had become redundant. However, I made the scene more complex and articulated, because now I start from old magazines provided by the state of Israel in the 1950s to promote the immigration of new families».
Graduated at the Accademia di Brera, Barbara Nahmad teaches at the Accademia di Brera. She had solo shows in Italy and abroad (Slovenia, Holland, Israel) and she took part in major collective exhibitions (“Sui generis”, “New reality painters”) at Pac, the Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan and at Palazzo Reale (“Italian Art 1968-2007”), always in Milan, in addition to the XIV Quadriennale of Rome and to the 53rd Venice Biennial. Edward Lucie-Smith wrote about her art in “Art tomorrow” and she is listed in the catalogue of the Excellent Painters, curated by the critic Camillo Langone.
«The inspiration of Barbara Nahmad – writes Cristiana Curti – comes mostly from the careful selection of photographs taken from rotogravures, magazines, web or video stills. This method resists even today. From the first production that aimed at the shocking color of the canvas, prepared with extreme care and made with vivid enamels, where the human figure (mostly feminine), often naked, with a strong sign was inserted with the strong erotic connotation to extrapolate a detail that it would not have as much sensuality as the infinite power of the material we are composed, Barbara transposes the sharp and perfect violence of her brush in the many portraits of the series of icons both from the art of the past and political, artistic, social history with a clear preference for the period between the ’50s and’ 60s of the last century. »
With “Jumping rope”, the painting presented here, – as Margherita Fontanesi wrote – «Nahmad leaves the forest behind a girl who plays and represents a growing population like that of the young State of Israel, a people that, without forgetting, is willing to leave behind itself the own “dark forest” to look forward.»
