A GLIMPSE OF …

Duoshow with Anne Cecile Surga at Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami, 2021

Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to announce A glimpse of..., a dual exhibition which tells the story of two female artists, sculptor Anne Cecile Surga (b. 1987, Lavelanet, France) and painter Sophie Ullrich (b. 1990, Geneva, Switzerland). Though they have never met, and they couldn’t be more different in terms of material, curator Valeria Schäfer posits a complementary relationship between their work, predicated upon their shared subtle gestures and impressions which express the fleeting nature of existence. Anne Cecile chose marble as her signaturematerial in 2013 while studying at the Fundación Pablo Atchugarry in Uruguay. She transforms the hard material into a deceptively soft and pliable one; traces of human handprints effortlessly drag through the marble, while other pieces appear to slump under the force of their own weight. Her works have been shown internationally, and can be found in the public collection of Museo MUST, Vimercate, Italy, and in the private collection of Pablo Atchugarry. Anne Cecile has won several prizes for her work, including the YICCA Art Prize in 2017, the Mary Beth Gutkowski Scholarship in 2019, and the On Form bursary in 2020. In 2015, she opened her studio in the Pyrenean Mountains in France where she still lives and works. Sophie Ullrich studied painting and visual arts in the class of Eberhard Havekost at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The young German artist packs her paintings with art-historical references, combining the life-like renderings of female figures that dominated renaissance painting with comic-like symbols that condense language of hieroglyphs with that of advertisement and its co-option in the movement of neo-expressionism. Gallery goers in Luxembourg first discovered her work in the group exhibition Just So Stories at Nosbaum Reding in 2019. Her work has since been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, among others at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and Tapetenwerk in Leipzig. She lives and works in Düsseldorf. Traces of a human figure emerge throughout the works of the two young women, echoing the transient experience of life itself. In the sculptures by Anne Cecile Surga you can feel the immanent presence of the human being. La Historia de Dos Amores, 2021 not only expresses the encounter of two lovers in the title, but also in the sculpture. There are traces of human handprints on all four sides of the marble block. It has been hugged, it has been loved, but the people do not exist, no faces can be recognized and yet we sense their presence when we look at the marble. The way in which Anne Cecile works this hard stone is remarkable. Marble no longer looks like marble, in her other works she distorts the apparent heaviness of the material through forms that have slumped into themselves—as if it were hot wax that changes shape with the lightest touch. Sophie Ullrich’s paintings, which cannot be assigned to either abstraction or figuration, are dominated by her typical comic-like character that appears on the canvas. Sophie paints freely, without previous drawing, every brushstroke is perfect. This ease is reflected in the Figura Serpentinata (a typical stylistic device in Mannerism) in Rückendeckung / Backing (2021), which dances across the canvas with two swords in her hand, surrounded by wild (and quite) coeval color fields that not only define the shape of the figure, but also compose the canvas. Together, the work of Anne Cecile Surga and Sophie Ullrich offer a touch of humor and a touch of human presence, raising the question of the subjectivity of human existence, but also the sense of self and the awareness of others. Humor here seems to be the answer to these philosophical questions, or at least a glimpse of it.