A unique exhibition titled ‘Pop-up’ by Italian artist Sabrina Puppin opened on Wednesday at Eiwan Al Gassar, St Regis Doha, featuring more than 130 artworks that “take visitors to an abstract world formed by fascinating shapes and colours.”
“I love colours. For me, art should give you some beauty, some moment of good time and that’s how I express it,” the artist told reporters.
The exhibition forms part of ‘Italian Contemporary Art Day’ in Qatar, a major annual event celebrated on December 5 and promoted by the Association of Italian Museums of Contemporary Art and Italian embassy in Doha.
Puppin, who lives between Doha and New York and Italy, said ‘Pop-up’ is an experimentation with media since her work focuses with four different glazes and tests it in different surfaces.
“What I like to do is create abstraction that absolutely doesn’t represent anything that could be recalled reality and see how the viewer interprets this reality,” she added.
About the influence of Qatari or Middle Eastern culture to her work, she said: “Maybe some colours, some things recalled from the desert, from something I saw from the colour of the sea but I cannot tell you if that is middle eastern or Italian, you cannot recognise what is the country behind that.”
“In the subconscious, 15 years of my life in the Middle East so for sure there is something coming out there but it is not consciously done, it is something that comes out without knowing,” added Puppin, who is an internationally exhibited visual artist, and held solo shows at the Fire Station in Doha.
A pop-up exhibition serves as a temporary and less formal art event, and suits the current situation since many cultural events have been either cancelled or postponed due to the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. “Artists can just Pop-up to remind us that we should not forget art and culture.”
“It’s a new concept of a pop up exhibition, meaning an event that has short span of time, it literally pops up and disappears and also because her (Puppin) arts somehow express this very concept of popping up as you can see they are multicolours and literally popping up of the frames, there are many perspectives,” Italian ambassador Alessandro Prunas said. “We are very grateful to her for participating and having her here.”