Sandy Skoglund | Visioni Ibride

A great retrospective dedicated to the American artist Sandy Skoglund (1946), curated by Germano Celant.
The exhibition thus allows us to follow this path through more than hundred works. Ranging from the earliest photographic series in the mid ’70s, which already feature the characteristic themes of the domestic setting and its transformation into a place of apparitions between the comical and the unsettling, right up to the great compositions of the early 1980s, which were to lead the artist to international fame. In particular, we recall the visionary Radioactive Cats (1980) and her Revenge of the Goldfish (1981), which became outright icons of the period, surreal and estranging reappraisals of family settings with unlikely colours, invaded by green cats and flying fish.

Among the many historical works that make up this exhibition, we might recall the twenty shots from the series True Fiction Two, produced between 1986 and 2005, which offers a lysergic interpretation of the American way of life, the spectacular compositions Fox Games (1989) and The Green House (1990), with their now iconic animals: red foxes and purple dogs. They are followed by the ballad of Shimmering Madness (1998), where the statues and the human figures share the same space in a crazy choreography, and the visionary picnic of Raining Popcorn (2001). We then come to the two most recent works, Fresh Hybrid (2008) and the previously unseen Winter (2018). These are the first two chapters of a series dedicated to the four seasons, among the most ambitious and daring works undertaken by the artist: reflections not only on art but on life, in the ever more complex relationship between the human being and nature, between reality and artifice. As Sandy Skoglund writes : “Each fragment of Winter has been chosen to express the primal fear of human dependence on nature and on ourselves. We are not alone, and our situation is endlessly precarious.”