Orecchie D’Asino (OD’A) & Peter McDonald
Orecchie D’Asino is an artistic duo, composed by Ornella De Carlo and Federica Porro, with a mobile practice capable of questioning the process of making and enjoying art, moving through different media, such as installation, video and performance. OD’A has taken part in solo and group exhibitions at Palazzo Santa Margherita of Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena(2024); Adiacenze, Bologna (2023); Metronom, Modena (2023); palmera Gallery, Bergen (2023), Bergen Ateliergruppe (2023), Fondazione Carlo Gajani, Bologna (2022); Habitat Ottantatre, Verona (2022); Parsec, Bologna (2022); Biblioteca Salaborsa, Bologna (2021); MLZ ART Dep, Trieste (2021); Palazzo del Governatore, Parma (2021).
The paintings of Peter McDonald (Tokyo, 1973) examine intricate aspects of human behaviour, gradually compiling an endless encyclopaedia of images and scenarios. His use of intense colours and universal subjects describes a realm balanced between lucid realism and vivid distortions, filled with references to modern life such as iPhones, queues, fashion shows and cafes. His images investigate pictorial space by playfully exploring perspective and form. This heightened sense of reality is a medium through which the artist articulates experience and meaning.
With-ness – Orecchie D’Asino, Peter Mc Donald
Curated by Francesca Lazzarini
23.11. 2024 – 18. 01. 2025
MLZ Art Dep, Wiener Art Foundation and AiR Trieste
via Roma 15, Trieste
With-ness’ – according to anthropologist Tim Ingold – means being with, co-responding to the world we are part of, and transforming ourselves alongside the people and things we move forward with in the flowing of time. ‘With-ness’ is attentional: an attunement to the in-betweenness of things in becoming.
The exhibition, opening at MLZ Art Dep on the 23rd November, emerges from a one-year collaboration between the painter Peter McDonald, Orecchie d’Asino, and the curator Francesca Lazzarini. Through a dialogue nourished by reciprocal presentations, shared readings, and exchanges of thoughts, the project took shape as a collective endeavour in which new and old works by the artists attend one another in a multilayered entanglement.
The ongoing site-specific installation by Orecchie d’Asino, It Licks Me Like an Ice Cream, and different series of paintings and works on paper by McDonald are gathered in the exhibition venue, mobilising the various concepts that emerged along the shared process. From the notions of assemblage and threshold to questions about the emergence of new forms by escaping pre-stablished modes of knowing, from the attunement to ordinary minor objects to the interrogation of the roles of art and representation, the show unfolds the multiple potentials of being, thinking and making art ‘with’. On the occasion of the opening, a performance by Orecchie d’Asino will allow visitors to cross the threshold of the exhibition and beyond.
