Abstract

Through inherently ambiguous imagery, Silvio Wolf’s artistic practice explores inner and outer spaces that are perceptual and psychological, questioning how images shape, alter and transform what we see and what we think.

Presenting artworks and installations that challenge Euclidian geometry from multiple points of view and unorthodox perspectives and engaging the physical location in which they are experienced, Wolf invites the viewer to become an active part of the visible and its interpretation, to explore what we know through what we see.

We live immersed in a bulimic state of overexposure to a multitude of often no longer discernible information and stimuli that constantly stream from the outside world.  Where does the image stand in the relationship between the visible external world and our lightless internal one?

Images are formed in our mind and result from the connection of these separate and manifold realms, which are so very close, yet enormously distant. Exploring the relation between these two tightly connected worlds, Wolf sees the Image as a Threshold that connects and separates inside and outside, present and past, here and elsewhere, and Visible and Invisible, so that one would not exist without the other.

Is there a way to know Who We Are through How We See and, ultimately, Can an Image tell me Who I am? In Wolf’s understanding, it is not about the way things are, but the way we see them, and we are immersed in a limitless and mysterious ground of investigation.

Biography

Silvio Wolf was born in Italy; he lives and works in Milan and New York. He studied Philosophy and Psychology in Italy and Photography and Visual Arts in England. In his site-specific installations, as in all his photographic work, the issues of Absence, Elsewhere and the Threshold are always central.

He has shown in galleries, museums and public spaces in Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Luxembourg, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. He teaches Photography at the European Institute of Design in Milan and is a Visiting Professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

http://silviowolf.com/

"The Names of Time", Site-specific installation Biennale di Venezia, Italian Pavilion 2009