LANDSCAPE AMNESIA
Florian Neufeldt
Opening reception: May 2nd 2023, 6 pm
03.05.2023 – 28.07.2023
The Gallery Apart, Via Francesco Negri 43, Rome
The Gallery Apart is proud to present Landscape Amnesia, the fifth solo show in the gallery by
Florian Neufeldt (1976), German artist based in Berlin.
Throughout his artistic practice, Neufeldt has always held firm to certain lines of direction. While
modifying the scale of his artistic interventions, at times monumental and at times of smaller
sculptural size, the artist’s work has always revolved around the alteration, reconfiguration,
and transformation of ordinary objects, often making the sculptural result of such work
dialogue with the spaces and architectures designed to host the works.
Neufeldt’s sculptures inspire uncertainty in the viewer as they keep traces of the original
object, which, however, is often difficult to recognize precisely because of the process of
transformation pursued by the artist. Thus, Neufeldt’s poetics should not be seen as the
demiurgic or alchemical action of the artist who creates another reality, but rather as the work
of a witness to concrete reality, inhabited by real objects that are manipulated to highlight
the richness of possible different identities entrusted to new presences.
Believing that the old never leaves the new, Neufeldt is committed to looking for breaking
points, or stepping stones, in the perceptual system that guides us through the world as we
know it. We proceed likesomnambulists in a familiar environment inhabited by presences
which might have been forgotten, until we stumble upon something precisely where we
thought there was nothing to see: it is memory that guides us, despite memories seem to slip
away. It is an ancestral memory that allows us to adapt to the environment that, however,
suffers from a limitation, that is the inability to recognize the creeping change, that which
makes become only what we need normal.
Landscape Amnesia describes our loss of memory. Neufeldt borrows the expression from
Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive,” where the author
attempts to circumscribe the human perceptual horizon within man-made environmental
catastrophes. In nature, change is slow and gradual, and man is hardly aware of it. With
Landscape Amnesia Neufeldt intends to emphasize how our perception and selectivity of
memories are mostly framed and produced by social patterns and are severely limited by our
cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, our perception is much more than a reflex and it is possible to
find ways to activate memory and consciousness. This is what Neufeldt tries to convey to us
by activating our perception with his works.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
EXHIBITION: Florian Neufeldt – Landscape Amnesia
VENUE: The Gallery Apart – Via Francesco Negri, 43, Rome
OPENING RECEPTION: 02.05.2023
EXHIBITION DURATION: 03.05.2023 – 28.07.2023
OPENING HOURS: Tuesday-Friday, 3 pm – 7 pm, and by appointment
INFO: The Gallery Apart – tel/fax 0668809863 – info@thegalleryapart.it – www.thegalleryapart.it
FLORIAN NEUFELDT
Florian Neufeldt (Bonn, 1976) lives and works in Berlin. After studying Fine Arts at the
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Tony Cragg, he then graduated in Sociology in Berlin. Florian
Neufeldt has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in European institutional spaces
including Stavanger Art Museum, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Deutsches Hygiene Museum Dresden,
CIAC Museum Genazzano, and FRAC Orleans.
