Roberto Cuoghi: Perla Pollina, 1996-2016

The Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève is happy to present Perla Pollina  the first mid-career retrospective of Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi.

Perla Pollina will comprise approximately 70 works, spanning 1996 to 2016 and covering the different aspects of his rich and intricate production. Through an array of unconventional techniques, Cuoghi’s paintings, drawings, sculptures and animations explore the notions of metamorphosis, hybridity and devotion.

Known for his legendary transformation into a 67 year old man for seven years when in his twenties, Roberto Cuoghi is one of today’s most mysterious and radical artists. Concepts of perpetual experimentation, rule breaking, continuous and processual learning are central to his work: From il Coccodeista (1997), a series of works born from the artist’s idea to spend days wearing glasses whose lenses had been replaced by Pechan prisms, inverting and reversing his vision, to his intensive two-year study of the Assyrian language and rituals, after which he made a giant reproduction of a small talismanic statue of the menacing demon-god Pazuzu (Pazuzu, 2008) and a hybrid sound installation combining music of western and non-western cultures; (Šuillakku— corral version, 2014). More recently, Cuoghi combined sophisticated 3D technology and unpredictable archaic firing techniques to create an invasion of ceramic crabs on the island of Hydra, Greece (Putifiero, 2016).