This year’s One Art Taipei event yesterday opened to the public at the Sherwood Taipei with a display of more than 3,000 contemporary works of art from across Asia.
The art fair, spread over three floors of the hotel, features works by artists from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong, and from 67 galleries across Asia.
A series of 12 contemporary pieces by 24-year-old Austrian artist Alessandro Painsi, which were on loan from the Be Fine Art Gallery in Taipei, attracted attention in an empty room of the hotel.
“We had an idea to build a room inside a room, because hotel rooms are always neat and perfect, but I wanted to create something that was really rough and raw,” Painsi said. “I wanted it to remind me of my studio and my work, which is very rough.”
One of Painsi’s eye-catching pieces was his Head of Lucifer painting.
“At the first moment, it is very chaotic and there is a lot going on,” Painsi’s curator and agent Anne-Marie Avramut said. “You see different textiles cut out and glued and sewn together by hand. You see big splashes of oil paint, writing in oil stick and very powerful and big gestures of brush strokes.”
However, what looks like chaos is meant to represent the core idea of the universe, she said.
It is “the concept of duality, which is reflected through Lucifer, who in European mythology is the one concept that incorporates both darkness and light, together,” Avramut said.
“It is like the Asian principle of yin and yang,” she added.
This year is the second year of the hotel art fair, which started last year, when it sold about 800 pieces, One Art Taipei director Rick Wang (王瑞棋) said.
“I’m definitely sure that the numbers are going to increase this year, judging from the delivery notices that we have received so far,” he said.
One Art Taipei, which opened on Friday for art collectors and special guests, runs until today.
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