At the Fondazione Stelline the new solo exhibition of Omar Hassan, the boxing artist

Opening on Nov. 8, 2022 at the Fondazione Stelline in Milan, in Gallery I of the Sala del Collezionista and in the Magnolia Cloister, the new solo exhibition by Omar Hassan entitled Il mondo è N(v)ostro, organized and promoted by the Fondazione Stelline, under the patronage of the Lombardy Region and the City of Milan, and open until Jan. 8, 2023. Known for his highly personal action painting and his style of great visual and emotional impact, the artist sees in the gesture of combat a metaphor for life by transforming it into art.

Omar Hassan has always experimented between painting and sculpture. In the exhibition project designed specifically for the spaces of the Fondazione Stelline, the artist goes beyond his being a"boxing artist" to reveal new aspects of his art, a mirror and expression of different states of mind, an explosion of energy and at the same time intimate introspection.

Recurrent in his artistic research are time and theobsession with its passing. It is not only the memory of the sporting experience, where a set time punctuates the rounds of the game in the ring, but it is also the time of his living, the time that every day imposes five injections of insulin on him. “I chose to do things that make me live forever,” he writes in his first book Per le strade published by Baldini - Castoldi in 2021 with a preface by Marco D’Amore and Mondo Marcio.

Seven installations, consisting of about twenty works, will be on display, including the Map of Berlin and the Map of Milan, created especially for the exhibition and made with 8928 spray can caps painted one by one with fingers, “to give importance to the individual, because each of us is fundamental to create a harmonious and serene whole.” The spray can is the primary tool of the first phase of Hassan’s artistic journey, and the spray can is the first real breath of the can, encompassing the meaning of the entire street art culture. However, Hassan goes further and uses spray paint both as a material and as a sculptural object, and the cap becomes its symbol.

The exhibition continues with a large installation from the new Lights series. Organic works, where luminous dots are superimposed on the imprint of a fist. Painted over the black canvas of Breaking Through, their light emerges from the darkness.

Closing the exhibition is a selection of works from the Breaking Through Black series, which has 121 large paintings, like the number of rounds the artist played during his short boxing career. All unique pieces, made by striking the canvas with paint-soaked boxing gloves, as if he were in combat, in the ring. The power of the gesture, the vital energy and culture to which it belongs is amplified by the sounds of the video on the opposite wall. Opening this section of the exhibition is the hyperrealist sculpture The Fist of Michelangelo, a glove made of pure white plaster.

Hassan’s language is balanced, or constantly poised, between classicism and experimentation, between powerful and instinctive gesture and compositional reason. His artistic journey finds in the idea of tracing time through gesture a common thread among all the works on display.

Finally, the Magnolia Cloister will feature the installation Under the Chimneys, composed of chimneys of different sizes, including one three meters high that, still playing on the inversion of meaning, become our vent to the sky to return to the ground. They emit not polluting fumes, but scents, aromas, feelings and familiar affections.

The exhibition also includes the tapestry More than One, created as a special edition for Driade, which will be displayed in the bookshop.

For more info: www.stelline.it

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Free ingressp.

Image: Omar Hassan, Breaking Through Black #8 Octavio (2020; Mixed media on canvas, 160 x 200 cm)

At the Fondazione Stelline the new solo exhibition of Omar Hassan, the boxing artist

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