Friedman Benda is pleased to announce Salut, ça va, c’est moi the fourth solo exhibition for Carmen D’Apollonio with the gallery. The show will open on September 11th, with a reception in the presence of the artist.

With Salut, ça va, c’est moi the Swiss-born Los Angeles-based artist returns, delightfully enhancing her signature ludic spirit. For these works, she engages with new materials, expanding her dimensionality and resulting in a new level of visual storytelling.

Salut, ça va, c’est moi is the artist’s most ambitious body of work to date and with it, D’Apollonio rejects formal design formats, employing her lit creations to elicit emotion, question our humanity, and rethink how we engage with each other.

The exhibition lays out like a stage, with a cohort of personified and illuminated characters, making unique entrances and enacting clever performances across the gallery space. These new works —all functioning lamps —cascade over pedestals, with figures that peek into walls, lie on the floor, suspend from the ceiling, grow, drip, and meander. Again I go unnoticed cascades amorphously off the pedestal and its glass shade appears to dance in space.

The introduction of sculpted glass lampshades is a crucial turning point for D’Apollonio. Expressive, reflective, and offering an interplay of light and shadow, they create a see-saw between form and matter and open new narrative potential. What was formerly obscured behind linen shades is now revealed – at least partially- and crafted. It’s all a big mystery for example, refracts, reflects, transmits, and most of all intrigues, as it still seems hidden in plain sight.

Language has always offered an additional window into the artist’s sensibilities, inspired by direct scenarios, accessible and universal, expressing and validating vulnerability with humor and redeeming it through art. These works claim space – both visually and emotionally. Why fall in love when you can’t fall asleep, if you ever have forever, bring the viewer into direct dialogue with the artist. They are memorable, their titles raw and confessional, eliciting empathy, reflection, and memory.

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited-edition artist book, Salut, ça va, c’est, photographed by Stephanie Kunz, designed by Carina Frey & Stefanie Barth, and published by Quodlibet s.r.l.