The impact of Covid-19 on artists. Part 4: artistic responses to the coronavirus and the prescient zeitgeist

16/04/20

Part 4: artistic responses to the coronavirus and the prescient zeitgeist

In the fourth instalment of this five-part essay, comprising conversations with artists around the world, we look at the work artists have made in response to the coronavirus, and the prescient zeitgeist

Unsurprisingly, a lot of art is already beginning to be produced in direct response to the coronavirus. Anita Glesta (b1958, New York) began working on a new film piece, Corona Butterfly, even before New York City – or the rest of the world – was in its current state. In her work, the virus is depicted as an insect or bug that enters and flies through organs in the human body. “The butterfly isn’t beautiful or ugly,” she says, “but it is clearly a presence foreign to the body. It ends its journey in the lungs. I hope that with the juxtaposition of the beauty of the musical passage from Beethoven’s Piano Concerto Number 5 Opus 23 and the lightness of the flight of the butterfly, despite the gravity of its meaning, this work illuminates the paradoxical experience of our shared humanity during this quite terrifying time of crisis.”

Read the rest of part four here

Interview with Francesca Pasquali

17/07/16
Interview: Francesca Pasquali


Francesca Pasquale: Metamorphoses 
Tornabuoni Art
29 June - 17 September 2016

and 
Francesca Pasquale: Spiderwall 
MOCA London 
3 - 30 July 2016

Influenced by Italian art in general, and arte povera in particular, Bolognese artist Francesca Pasquali (b1980) creates fully immersive – often site-specific – installations, using everyday and industrial materials, reappropriating them and bringing them into the public’s realm of vision, and of the other senses too. Involving the public in the work of art is part of what it is all about for Pasquali, and she enjoys the interplay of movement, sometimes engendered by the person, sometimes by the material itself.

Showing in a commercial London gallery for the first time, Pasquali has created a large-scale, colourful, plastic cloud in Peckham’s MOCA London, and filled Mayfair’s Tornabuoni Art with a cross-section of her works, from her best-known pieces made with drinking straws, to a carpet of broom bristles, on which we sit to talk, during a break from installation.

Watch the interview here