Sergio Sarri, Paintings and works on paper: 1971 - 2021, installation view, Jan 29 - March 26, 2022

courtesy of the artist, Octagon, Milan & Fitzpatrick Gallery

Sergio Sarri

Paintings and works on paper: 1971 - 2021

In collaboration with Octagon, Milan

Fitzpatrick Gallery is pleased to represent the Italian artist Sergio Sarri (born 1938, Torino), after his first retrospective exhibition at the gallery, organized in collaboration with Octagon (Milan), an exhibition space curated by artist Jacopo Mazzetti.

At the core of Sarri’s work lies a committed fascination with the relationship between man and machine. In his sleekly stylized canvases, Sarri collages fragmented elements — both human and mechanical — into dark, often erotic fantasies reminiscent of 1920s cinema, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). With the vivid colors and violent contrasts of his canvases, Sarri’s futuristic visions evoke the cruelty of two parallel worlds in constant friction, in which man has become subordinate to the machines they themselves created.

The realism of certain elements, with their reflective surfaces and meticulously depicted curves, is juxtaposed with entirely flat areas, devoid of a sense of depth. Sarri’s paintings are often built from collages and divided into zones in the manner of a comic, without a narrative sequence. The precise detailing of screws, coils, and blades that constitute metallic structures, positions the human body as a tense and fragile object, controlled by the strong domination of metallic structures and hybrid apparatuses.

“The reader suddenly becomes aware that the panoply presented is only a fictitious imitation of a vast tool that works where his desire ends, and his conditioning begins.”

- Giovanni Joppolo, Sergio Sarri: the rooms of experimentation, 1976

Sarri originally studied painting in Bern, Switzerland and then in Paris in the late 1950s, but it was his first visit to the United States in 1965 when the subject of his paintings shifted to explore the connections between humanity and technology, which have remained the dominant themes of his career. For more than five decades he has continued to propose balanced juxtapositions between fantasy and analytic reality, with an iconographic symbolism that evokes science and science fiction. Sergio Sarri is a pioneer of the dualistic figuration between humanity and machinery whose iconic imagery remains pertinent to our current hyper accelerationist era.