Via

For Via, Wolfgang Capellari’s (b. 1964) first exhibition with Song Song, the artist presents landscapes painted along the Via Domitia, and a number of chairs constructed from various types of picture frame.

The Via Domitia was the first Roman road built in Gaul, to link Italy and Hispania through Gallia Narbonensis, across what is now southern France. The route that the Romans regularised and paved was ancient when they set out to survey it, so old that it traces the mythic route travelled by Heracles. Hannibal traversed it on his way from Hispania to Italy.

An instinctual reverence for the Roman road inspired Capellari to begin recording the native scenes in paint. The result is a body of work that is straightforward and unassuming, yet which captures in remarkably subtle tones a sense of the deep past which is unique to the contemporary eye and mind.

The artist “frames” the exhibition with chairs made from a diverse assortment of picture frames. Here the visitor is invited to sit in contemplation of the unframed canvases on the walls, and thereby to complete the artist’s witty conflation of Ornament and Function, Subject and Object.

Wolfgang Capellari lives and works in Berlin and Kitzbühel. He was born in 1964 in Kitzbühel. He studied at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Wien, from 1983 – 88. Recent exhibitions include Stadtmuseum Kitzbühel, 2012; „Veduten, Miniaturen und Im Wald“, Fehrbelliner 51, Berlin, 2009; „Das Landschafts Apriori“, Galerie Cora Hölzl, Düsseldorf, 2009; „handlungsanweisungen. Kunst am Parlament“, Kunsthalle Wien, 2008; and many more. More information about the artist can be found at www.wolfgangcapellari.com.