MAGDALENA
PETRONI
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The poster shows
an appropriated image of Welcome to Acid House, an anti-acid house
cartoon, published on November 2, 1988 in UK newspaper The Sun, by
longtime resident cartoonist Stanley Franklin, which sums up the tabloid frenzy
around the then emerging musical movement. Originally used as an anti-drug
propaganda, the image —once recontextualized— points out the absurdity of
political agendas and how countries that invest the most in campaigns to criminalize
a musical subculture, are also the largest investors of nuclear warfare.
Maggie
Petroni is an artist who explores the eroticism of matter, the ‘weird’ and the ‘queer’
as categories with a particularity of its own, within the genres of horror and
science fiction, and the associations these evoke. Her works explore otherness,
the uncanny, the fascination with the outside, the extrasensory in relation to
the alienated, that which is beyond perception, cognition and ordinary
experiences. She works within the terror generated by the formless, the
corroded and the decadent. The sinister or ominous and the eroticism of the
strange.
Bleach and
paraffin are two of the materials that Petroni uses to tarnish the tradition of
painting. Her sculptures and paintings, in this sense, are also more
biochemical than picturesque. Night is not a representation in her objects,
which are both paintings and sculptures, but a state of mind, the ideal moment
to be illuminated by the dark light emanating from her work.
Organized by Estudio Pedro Reyes
in collaboration with ICAN
ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB is an exhibition of posters that call for universal nuclear disarmament. Each made by a different artist, the group comprises historical and newly
commissioned works that detail a cultural history of disarmament movements and evidence the diversity of ways in which artists have expressed the need to ban the bomb. ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB is designed for maximum agility and economic effectiveness, relying on a black and white palette both for its impact and ease o reproduction. We asked artists to ensure their works can exist on a variety of supports, ephemera such as posters, postcards, billboards, banners, flags, t-shirts and social media posts, as we aspire to achieve the widest possible circulation of this message.
ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB presents the works of foundational conceptual artists Art & Language; pop hero, Keith Haring; legendary feminists, Guerrilla Girls; performance artists Regina José Galindo and Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, as well
as eminent sculptors Magdalena Abakanowicz and Isamu Noguchi. It also features indelible photographs by Robert Del Tredici and Ken Domon alongside protest graphics from social movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in 1958 and still active; the epic Peace Squadron and Visual Artists Against Nuclear Arms (VAANA); and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Additionally, it examines how stories are told, from the theater of Bread and Puppet to films like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Marguerite Duras / Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, to an unexpected survey of literature, from an early
anticipation of an atomic bomb, first envisioned by H.G. Wells in 1918, to the viscera spoken word poetry of Jayne Cortez.
ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB, organized by Estudio Pedro Reyes in collaboration with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), is presented on the occasion of the Second Meeting of State Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) held at the United Nations in 2023.
To organize en exhibition of ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB please contact curatorial assistant Verana Codina.
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