Purity. Barry X Ball

From 17 October to 17 November the Palazzo Mansi National Museum will be the show case of the coming together of past and present, tradition and avant-garde. For the occasion of Lu.BE.C, the latest generation of digital technology enters the Museum with the exhibition “Purity. Barry X Ball, The Obsession with the Object”.

Barry X Ball was born in 1955, in Pasadena, California, and presently lives and works in New York. Right from the minimalist beginnings at the start of his artistic career in the early eighties, the artist has perceived his work as a contemporary response to the great masterpieces of the past – not with the intention of copying them in a competitive way, but to derive inspiration from and be challenged by their beauty, expressive strength and formal quality, like a kind of “magic obsession”. For the reinterpretation of the classical, Barry X Ball uses a series of complex equipment and procedures, from the most innovative (3D digital scanning, virtual design and computer controlled modelling) to the traditional (intaglio in stone and precious marble and dressing by hand), to recreate, through playing with transparency, distortion, the use of different materials and variations in size, the same intensity and harmony of the originals. When completed, his creations are also foreseen to interact with the surroundings of a particular space, personally selected by the artist for exhibition.

The work “Purity” is inspired by “La Dama Velata” by Antonio Corradini.