Piero Golia: Concrete Cakes and Constellation Paintings

From the outset of his career, Golia’s principal focus has been the theatrical and the conceptual in art, specifically supreme gestures and the completion of seemingly impossible acts. In this exhibition, Golia applies his embrace of contingency to more traditional forms of art production. TheConstellation Paintings derived from an incident in 2010 where a taxi-driver smashed his car directly into Golia’s house following an argument over a fare. The impact demolished most of his possessions including his collection of art, furniture, and design. Salvaging debris from the total disaster, Golia burnished the remnants and embedded them within large slabs of jet-black glossy resin to produce vast abstractions with lustrous, galactic surfaces.

In direct contrast to the dark, expansive Constellation Paintings are the intimately scaled and pristine sculpturesConcrete Cakes, the result of a similarly happy accident. Golia received thirteen cake molds as gifts and decided to make something of this domestic excess. Using the molds as casts for sculptures rather than for baking cakes, he filled them with pure white concrete. The resulting objects look like enigmatic modern readymades carved from classical marble.

Piero Golia
Concrete Cakes and Constellation Paintings