| Dates: | born 1947
| | Biography: | 1947 Born in Trieste, Italy.
Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1998-99 Te Awatea (The Awakening),
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New
Plymouth,
New Zealand
1998 My Own Particular Anxiety
(Eudosia), The Art Gallery of New South
Wales,
Sydney
1997 The Diver's Clothes Lying Empty:
Domenico de Clario: A Survey 1966-
1996,
Monash University Gallery, Melbourne
1995 From the Opaque (Solstice), Thread
Waxing Space, New York
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1998-99 Ways of Being, Ivan Dougherty
Gallery, University of New South Wales,
Sydney
1998 The Quiet in the Land: Everyday
Life, Contemporary Art and the Shakers,
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
(1998); Portland Museum of Art, Maine
(1997); Sabbath Day ake, Shaker
Village, Maine (1996)
Remanence (My Own Particular
Anxiety), City atch-house, Melbourne
Magistrates Court, Melbourne
1997-98 McCaughey Invitation Prize,
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1997 On Dialogue, Haus-am-Waudsee,
Berlin
1996 Blast, Thread Waxing Space, New
York
The Cauldron: Fusion of the 5 Elements,
Northcote Uniting Church, Melbourne
1992 Rediscovery: Australian Artists in
Europe 1981-1991, Seville; Paris;
Amsterdam; Berlin
1991 Off the Wall, In the Air: A
Seventies Selection, Australian Centre
for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
1986 Australijana: Contemporary
Australian Painting, National Gallery of
Yugoslavia,
Belgrade
Isolaustralia: 13 Australian Artists,
Fondazione Bevilacqua, La Masa, Italy
FURTHER READING
Burke, J. "Collaboration: Artists Working
Collectively," Anything Goes: Art in
Australia 1970-
1980, ed. P. Taylor,
South Yarra, Vic. 1984,123-25
Colless, E. The Diver's Clothes Lying
Empty (exh. cat.), Monash University
Gallery,
Melbourne 1997
Johnson, A. ""Domenico de Clario,"" Art
and Text 39 (May 1991): 66-7
| | | Source: | "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue | | | Date of source: | 1999 |
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| | Description: | Domenico De Clario is an Australian
artist of Italian ancestry. He has made
use of painting, assemblage, text and
performance, as well as site-specific and
installation art to trace his memories and
family migrations. Childhood,
adolescence and adulthood are explored
through everyday objects and personal
effects. As an Italian migrant the
experiences of dispossession and
migration have been constant themes in
his art. De Clario's recent perform¬ances
have often entailed blindfolded journeys
to sites of personal significance. In many
of the performances he plays meditative
harmonies on a grand piano,
occasionally speaking to himself or to an
unseen listener.
In a recent performance in Melbourne
Magistrates Court, De Clario sat at the
piano with his parents and sister
completing a circle around the
instrument. They were all blindfolded and
bound by a black ribbon. Domenico
occasionally spoke to them in their
native Tuscan dialect and they gently
reminisced together on matters of family
history. Their stories were not
accessible to the English-speaking
audience and yet their intimacy allowed
us for a moment to share in something
precious: not information about events
past, but a sense of mutual trust and
family love. By wearing a blindfold the
artist also avoids the confrontational and
controlling aspects of performance. He is
himself highly vulnerable, allowing the
audience to enter his private world.
De Clario is performing on 14 nights
centred on the opening of the Biennial.
(By chance, the opening night coincides
with the equinox and is also, unusually,
a night of the full moon.) The artist will
travel across seven sites, back and forth
over two weeks, following the moon
through its entire phase. Each night he
will play the piano accompa¬nied by a
saxophonist, and tell stories of the
journey and of his response to the site.
The performances will last for the nine
hours between sunset and dawn, and
the sites will be illuminated with a
different colour for each of the first seven
nights. These colours - which are
associated with the seven energy
centres of the body (chakras) - will then
be repeated as he retraces his steps on
the subsequent seven nights. As a
lasting trace within the exhibition, each
site will be marked with a written text of
the stories recounted by the artist during
his journey.
| | Description Source: | "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue | | Description Source Date: | 1999 | | Gender: | male | | Type: | person |
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