Alix Smith / Erika Somogyi

28 April - 26 May 2006

The 404 arte contemporanea gallery of Naples goes on with its showing activity with a double exhibition dedicated to two young artists from New York: Alix Smith and Erika Somogyi who are at their first one-woman exhibition in Europe.
One of the main elements in Alix Smith’s work is the importance of the appearence. The artist, thanks to an objective vision, which is almost without emotions, creates photographic pictures with the purpose to explore the concept of identity and to tell about the desire of the chosen subject for social standing confirmation. Against a background of foundamental environments and spaces dedicated to the private life, young men and women are represented with their lost eyes while they pursue stereotyped behavioural models. In her work it is evident the cinematographic tone, almost on the borders between reality and fiction, still less the empty space and the absence of an existence which is hidden by a conventional patina.


Erika Somogyi, on the countrary, moves her research around the pictorial representation. She chooses as her subjects the things she sees around her, but beyond the reality of the imagination, her view spreads out from faraway imaginary lands. In fact, landscapes and characters which populate these sceneries are immerged in an enchanted and misterious atmosphere that partly reminds the bold style of the primitives but it catches the visitor offering him a dream to escape from the reality. Her works are constantly in equilibrium between mythological and contemporary; they reach the maximum power of suggestion with their bright and vivid colour, thanks to a suffused brilliance which changes radically the real fact and throw it out in an imaginary dimension.


Alix Smith was born in 1978; she lives and works in New York.
Education: School of Visual Arts New York, NY – Bowdoin College Brunswick, ME.

Erika Somogyi was born in Suffern in 1977, NY; she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Education: BFA School of Visual Arts.

www.404gallery.com