Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi makes videos, sculpture, paintings, and drawings, in a variety of unconventional media, which expand on the possibilities for transformation and question our understanding of identity. For his most legendary work, the artist, at the time a pierced punk, decided to followed his father’s daily routine of eating, dressing and working, and eventually came to resemble the middle-aged man. He created a monumental sculpture after a tiny bronze statue from the collection of the Louvre, of an Assyrian deity Pazuzu, king of the demons of the wind. He hand-crafted a number of ancient musical instruments, which he then used in a musical accompaniment to his own singing of a lamentation from 612 b.c. invoking the protection of the Assyrian gods. For his Hammer Projects exhibition, his first solo show in the U.S., Cuoghi presents a new series of self-portraits depicting the artist in a variety of personae, as if he had traveled down a different path in life, along with a black Carrara marble sculpture of the demon god Pazuzu.
Organized by Ali Subotnick, Hammer curator.