Today I would like to be a Tree 

Abed Al Kadiri | Eelco Brand | Jacob Hashimoto | Izima Kaoru
Franco Passalacqua | Roberto Pugliese | Lucas Reiner
Mario Schifano | Giorgia Severi | Andre Woodward   

On 17 April 2021 Studio la Città will be opening a group show titled Today I would like to be a Tree, devoted to trees as a subject of the work of a selection of 10 artists from different cultures and backgrounds.   

In August 2020 a violent cloudburst struck the territory of Verona, uprooting more than 500 large trees and damaging many others. Probably among the others were the two large Cedars of Lebanon that stood for decades by the Galtarossa firm next door to the gallery, and that in the past few weeks have been radically removed. In the days before the cloudburst we had heard news of the terrible explosion on 4 August 2020 in the port of Beirut, that devastated the city and destroyed many buildings including the Tanit gallery, to which we are united by a long friendship. The Tanit gallery had only just opened the show, on 27 June, Remains of the Last Red Rose by Abed Al Kadiri: after not even ten days everything was lost. In the face of this loss Abed decided to work on a new project Today I would like to be a Tree, as an answer to this suffocation, in the widest sense, by choosing trees as a symbol of life and resistance.   All this has led us to reflect once more on the mankind-nature relationship. We have pinpointed trees as the perspectival and focal thematic centre and have given to the show the same title as the project by Al Kadiri, of whom there are exhibited some works on paper and the original canvas.   The ten artists who make up the show have chosen the tree as an object, each of them with their own voice and language, and each has delineated a personal tale that speaks of nature, mankind, the force of action and rebirth, of the ability to find a balance, and of life in all its extraordinary complexity.