Maslen & Mehra / Federico Guida
Two person exhibition curated by Gianluca Marziani
Exhibition catalogue accompanying this project
27 October 2007 - 15 February 2008


First Gallery presents to the public the second show of its program 2007-2008. This is the first of a series projects titled AROUND; two person exhibitions that bring together the work of an Italian artist and a foreign artist.

The photography of Maslen & Mehra. The painting of Federico Guida.

The body that becomes geography. The landscape that metabolizes the bodies.

The intention of First Gallery is to open a space that can give life to projects of quality, accommodating national and international artists in the extraordinary frame of the historical center of Rome. The space is composed from four environments that cover a surface of beyond 200 square meters. The aim of First Gallery is to engage with artists, national and international curators and realise "open" collaborations between different media and subjects. The project will include traditional media such as painting and sculpture but will also incorporate photography, video and other disciplines like music and writing.

Maslen & Mehra open their photographic lens in a wide field, on the territories of the world, finding a subject in things we take for granted. Cities like Paris and Berlin, woods and forests, desolate beaches: are situations in which they map out the geography of placement. Shimmering presences; the narrative field in which, the outline of the two sculptors becomes an anomalous protagonist in a silent invasion. Here soldiers in salute, animals of various species, people in civilian clothes and postures: They stand in real space but their bodies are pure mirror, destabilizing the spacial relations but also the typical way we look at social dynamics.

Maslen & Mehra construct their scenes in meticulous frames, positioning the sculptures before photographing them. The images are born from installations in real space in which the arrangement of the works seems like a hypothetical performance. It is a transcontinental journey that evokes and refreshes the relationship between figure and its placement.

Maslen & Mehra live and work in London. Maslen & Mehra appear courtesy Galerie Caprice Horn/ Berlin.

Federico Guida drives in his world of devastated flesh, uneasy noisy bodies, fears and ferocious intimacies. A decent into shadows in a theatrical light where flesh is consumed and celebrated in a mystery of instincts. Around the revealed bodies move inserted and geometric contaminations; That transform into a heterogeneous pattern, a linguistic reference to Greenway who seems to have met Lucien Freud in a cruel theatre.

Guidas painting metabolizes different stimuli. You feel the weight lightness and the impact between softness and between the living and the inert. It pulses between counter points, finally fluctuating between nature and artifice, rough and smooth.

For his first show in Rome, the Milanese artist is exhibiting a series on boxing.

Federico Guida lives and works in Milan