Onishi Gallery is proud to present “Extraordinary Life” a group exhibition curated by Stefania Carrozzini, featured by eleven artists mostly from Italy. The exhibition is composed of 26 artworks: photographs, paintings, installations, sculptures, collages.

The artists developed the idea of extra-ordinary life looking into the conflicts of contemporary culture and into their own personal experiences.

In this exhibition we can find different expressive languages, assemblages, works involving the transformation of non-art objects and materials into sculptures, urban landscapes and imaginary worlds in which anything can happen, fantastic atmospheres, new dimensions of reality and different ways of seeing the world which go beyond the visible: a search for the poetic meaning of nature and the strength of emotions through color and light. All of the artists focused on representing time and space where daily life events meet the mysteries and secrets of existence, the dialectic of life.

There is no doubt that we live a chaotic yet at the same time extra-ordinary life. The prefix "extra" separated by the hyphen stands for everything which goes beyond the ordinary, beyond the apparent banality of our existence until it reaches those boundless territories which touch the totality of man and of the universe. It is a thin line which divides the two dimensions, the two poles flow into each other. In everyday life, each individual is immersed in daily activities and habits. The role of the artist is to bring out the extra-ordinary, to upset this "everydayness” through creative thinking which produces energetic sparks able to shake up our common sense and reality. It is the capacity to see beyond the depths of our existence, to be amazed by the mystery of this world. It is the cathartic and purifying purpose of artistic imagination. It is the desire to continue to provoke in the spectator, nowadays so used to seeing too much and seeing badly, existential energy in its essence, a new joie de vivre.

Art intervenes to fill the gaping hole of human ennuie, of emptiness of the spirit. To be able to see in the fleeting moment of our daily life new, extra-ordinary horizons of the senses means to go beyond the visible, to look for that truth hiding in all the ephemera of our existence. Because the invisible harmony is superior to the visible, and the extra-ordinariness of life is not the exception, but the real potential which each of us harbors within.

By Stefania Carrozzini

Curated by Stefania Carrozzini