Shades of Black

Shades of Black was a group exhibition at størpunkt, a gallery for contemporary art in Munich. According to the exhibition poster, it was curated by Anja Delastik and Yeliz Kaiser and brought together eleven international artists: Anton Höger, Dura, Eudald de Juana, Federico Clapis, Jesse Draxler, Lucas Zimmermann, Marie Boralevi, Rémy Hysbergue, Robin Whiteman, Ronit Baranga and Stefan Zsaitsits. The poster itself sets the tone, with a nocturnal photograph of traffic lights bleeding red and turquoise light into thick fog over an empty road, suggesting a show devoted to darkness, night and the unsettling side of the everyday.

Federico Clapis' work associated with the exhibition is Searching for God, a small mixed-media sculpture. It takes the figures of a traditional Italian nativity scene, Joseph leaning on his staff and Mary kneeling in prayer on either side of the manger, and covers the eyes of both with white virtual reality headsets. The crib between them is empty: the figures look down at a place where the child should be, but their gaze passes through a device.

The piece belongs to Clapis' physical production before his move to crypto art, when he used familiar religious and domestic imagery to question how technology mediates faith, attention and intimacy. In a show built around shades of darkness, its quiet irony points to a different kind of blindness, one chosen and worn.

Sources

• Shades of black — Federico Clapis