Federico Luger is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Amikam Toren in Milan. In his work, Amikam Toren transforms found objects and images into paintings, works on paper, videos, installations, and sculptures full of surprising depth, humor, and meaning.

Toren looks with interest at everyday objects. His reductivist approach explores how minimal intervention by the artist can produce a totally new concept, adding profundity and sensibility to the work. The show will focus on his most recent works, a series of painting titled: “No Frame, No Painting, No Void”. Here the artist transforms found frames into geometrical paintings. It can be considered an intermediate step between classicism and modernity, with a special touch of humor, always present in Amikam’s works. The exhibition also presents a selection of related works from different periods and series.

Three of his famous “Armchair Paintings”, recently acquired by the Tate Gallery will be included in the show. For this series he uses oil paintings bought at flea markets, which he reworks by cutting a stenciled text into the picture surface. Like the paintings, the texts are ready-mades from graffiti, signs and quotations, but the destructive intervention of the texts elevate the originals from the banal to the significant. Other works presented at the exhibition include a painting from his “Pidgin Painting” series where the canvas is used to paint itself and an important object/sculpture from the extraordinary series titled “Actuality” (1979-89).

Installed by the artist, the group of works exhibited creates a panorama of his career, demonstrating his extraordinary versatility. Amikam Toren was born in Israel in 1945. He lives and works in London. He has participated in the Venice and Paris Biennales, Tyne International, Guangzhou Triennial among many others, and his works have been exhibited in Tate Britain, Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and Royal Academy (London), Centre Pompidou and Le Plateau (Paris), Neuberger Museum of Art and Jewish Museum (New York), Fondacion Helga d’Alvear (Caceres), Kunstverein Freiburg and many other locations, since the early 1970s. Amikam Toren has been represented by Anthony Reynolds Gallery since 1983.