Platform for Art is delighted to present a photographic installation by Italian born artist Paola Pivi.
The exhibition comprises three enormous and beautiful images of zebras standing in a landscape of mountains and snow. The photographs are installed on the disused platform in London Underground’s busy Gloucester Road station.
To make these images, Pivi transported two zebras to the Italian National Park of Velino Sirente to be photographed against the backdrop of the mountains there. The work is one of several that she has produced where animals are pictured in unexpected places. A donkey riding in a small boat was the focus of one earlier image. It was reproduced banner size and hung high on the side of a building in Venice for the Venice Biennial, 2003, and in Brown University, Providence, USA, in 2004. Like the image of the zebras in the snow though, it’s hard to say what it might mean.
Paola Pivi’s projects arise out of fleeting ideas that she realises through a process of organising and performing a vast range of tasks. The end results, whether photographs or works in other media, often place the familiar in unlikely combinations to reveal something absurd, enigmatic or humorous but frequently beautiful. Certainly the Gloucester Road installation should give passengers something different to consider as they continue their journeys.
