Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

KS ART presents Italian artist Ele D’Artagnan’s second one–person show in New York, featuring his visionary drawings and watercolors from the 1970s. D’Artagnan (1911 – 1987), a trained actor, self-taught artist, and vagabond extraordinaire who floated in and out of the Italian Surrealist scene, made drawings employing a cosmic sexuality and psychedelic line that anticipate the vital work by numerous young artists today. D’Artagnan’s libidinally charged drawings had, for the most part, never previously been publicly exhibited before his first exhibition in 2003 at KS Art; five of these drawings were recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

A steamer trunk full of approximately 400 of D’Artagnan’s works was unearthed for the first time from a wine cave in Testaccio several years ago, the same gypsy neighborhood in Rome where D’Artagnan last lived – and where Fellini frequently filmed. D’Artagnan’s artistic scrapbook, also in the trunk, pictures him in photographs throughout the years with Dali, de Chirico, Gina Lollobrigida, and many others. Ele D’Artagnan’s work suggests the cosmic vitality of a lost era, while simultaneously evoking an uncanny affinity with recent artistic directions.