Angelo Musco: Tehom

May 1—July 10, 2010

Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce our next exhibition, Tehom, a solo show by Italian artist Angelo Musco. Two years in production, the show includes Musco’s photo installation Hadal, which was shown in the 53rd Venice Biennale last summer.

The title piece, Tehom, an underwater world populated with tens of thousands of nude bodies, will cover the main wall of the gallery stretching 12 x 48 feet wide. The dialogue between classic art forms and contemporary expressions is one of the main themes of Musco’s photographic work. Using mosaic type panels and photo pieces allows the artist to make the entire gallery a unique underwater world experience.

The etymology of Tehom comes from Hebrew literally meaning “deep” or “abyss”, and in the Bible refers to the great deep of the primordial waters of creation. Musco’s Tehom incorporates deep heavenly waters bursting with life, and dark spirals of humanity propelled together with grace and tension, some floating and other bodies fight to make contact and engage the viewer, not unlike the sirens of Greek mythology.

The show is made up of six different pieces. Hadal is constructed by 158 panels creating a swirling vortex of two thousand bodies reminiscent of a floating nest or a school of fish, each recurring themes of his work. Avernus further explores human forms in an artificial environment constructing patterns found in nature. By contrast, this triptych depicts not the vast open sea but rather an inland lake, one supposed by the Romans to be the entrance to Hades. The smallest work, Progeny, is an 8 x 8 bundle of limbs and torsos floating like a giant human egg. Sibille is a triptych of eleven beautiful women breaking the surface of the water with an otherworldly attitude that is a direct reference to Greek mythology.

Angelo Musco lives and works in New York City. His work uses the human body and is inspired by natural architecture relating to birth and the earliest markers of life: the zygote, amniotic fluid, and containers of life, nourishment, and the tensions of birth. The artist’s own traumatic birth in the eleventh month has left both physical and psychological scares on the artist and it is this experience, which inspires and informs his work.