Parkview Green Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition CHALLENGING BEAUTY -‐ Insights of Italian Contemporary Art, featuring the most representative works of Mr. George Wong’s Italian Contemporary Art Collection. The Exhibition will be held from July 16th. Curated by the internationally acclaimed curator and art historian Lorand Hegyi, the exhibition CHALLENGING BEAUTY— Insights of Italian Contemporary Art has its roots in Parkview Green’s exhibition dedicated to Italian contemporary art. Realized in 2014, the first exhibition presented an important part of George Wong’s collection of contemporary Italian art, mainly focused on artistic tendencies and phenomena of the Transavantgarde and the New Roman School as well as on some positions of contemporary aesthetical perspectives presented by the young generation of artists. This new exhibition, presenting a historically concentrated selection of art works by very important Italian artists of our time, manifests the diversity and poetic richness of artistic thinking and ethical responsibilities established in the 1980s and 90s, which continue to influence the creative activities of many younger contemporary artists today.
CHALLENGING BEAUTY—Insights of Italian Contemporary Art is unique in its reflection of the complex, fascinating and eclectic Italian artistic practices from the 1960s to the present through collector George Wong’s personal views and passionate interest for Italian contemporary art. Wong has acquired a number of fundamental works of Italian contemporary art spanning generations of artists. He developed a very strong personal relationship with Italy in recent years, becoming friends with several Italian artists and cultural personalities, visiting artist studios, collections, and museums, and amassing a large, complex and coherent collection of Italian art from the late 1960s to the present. Despite touching on a diverse range of tendencies, schools, groups and personalities, this collection embodies the collector’s individual choice, personal taste, convictions and views on beauty, responsibility, competence and vocation.
This exhibition does not set out to provide an exhaustive overview of Italian contemporary art practices from the post-‐war era to the most recent developments, but it does aspire to present the richness, the complexity and the eclectic, multifaceted nature of contemporary Italian art and to demonstrate the strong and widespread impact artists from these generations have had on a global level. The exhibition demonstrates how artists forged new identities from deeply rooted practices, by focusing on the artistic practices that, often defined by strong cultural specificity, managed to achieve international recognition and to articulate transnational narratives.
The presentation of George Wong’s art collection in CHALLENGING BEAUTY—Insights of Italian Contemporary Art offers a special view on contemporary creation in diverse fields of artistic practice, while also taking into account the geographical specificity of every movement: from the conceptual experiments and the radical revisiting of avant-‐garde idealism in the so called Arte Povera, to the reemergence of metaphoric images, and of eclectic and ironical subjectivity in painterly practice of the Transavantgarde; from the highly intellectual artistic approach based on the reinterpretation of cultural metaphors and the tradition of Mannerism in the aesthetics of the New Roman School (also known as Ultima Generazione), to the ironic deconstruction of former languages, and the seductive, critical and intriguing representation of human existential conditions and anthropological situations in contemporary society through the often subversive and provocative artistic language of the younger generation from the past two decades.
CHALLENGING BEAUTY—Insights of Italian Contemporary Art guides us through a rich, complex, exotic and picturesque garden where nostalgic narratives are mixed with seductive, ironical and critical approaches. George Wong has created a singular, specific collection of Italian art whose works are concerned with contemporary sensitivity as they continue the old narratives of quest for harmony, complexity and true engagement in human issues.
