Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani in London.
For the past 40 years Parmiggiani has concentrated his practice on themes of memory, absence and silence, in his search for an image, object or assemblage that transcends time and individual experience to evoke a universal, existen- tial truth.
For his fourth presentation with the gallery and his third exhibition in the London space, Parmiggiani presents a suite of new Delocazione works. These panels, painted with smoke and soot, filled with the shadowy imprints of books, transform the empty gallery walls into a ghostly library. The volumes that line each shelf appear burnt, dematerialised from physical object to residual outline. An additional single Delocazione panel embodies a human figure; the imprint of a vanished presence that haunts the artist’s library. Since Parmiggiani initiated the Delocazione they have become a recurrent and fundamental element of his oeuvre, amongst his most powerful expressions of absence.