Jem Perucchini: Sospiro

Sospiro presents new works by the Italian, Ethiopian-born painter Jem Perucchini (b. 1995) at David Zwirner's Tribeca gallery in New York. Following recent solo presentations at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, it is the artist's first exhibition in the United States. Perucchini's distinctive work draws on a wide range of sources, from early Italian Renaissance painting and the patterns of African wax-print textiles to ancient Greek mythology and the frescoes of Ethiopian churches. He fills seemingly familiar narrative scenes with a singular cast of characters—often youthful, lithe, and inscrutable—expanding the language of figurative painting while deftly drawing on the conventions of religious iconography and traditional portraiture. His striking compositions are frequently dominated by monochromatic, jewel-like hues and lit by a glowing spherical moon or sun, and his figures inhabit a saturated world that is at once past, present, and imagined. Standing outside any familiar historical chronology, his intricately painted and textured scenes evoke the timeless tensions and nuances of human experience: solitude and companionship, the archetype and the individual, light and darkness.