Justin Brice Guariglia

The letters carved out of the white surface form into a monumental unambiguous statement: ‘The End’. Justin Brice Guariglia’s largeformat work The End (2019) punctuates the starting point of the exhibition tour. For many years now, the artist’s works have been looking at mankind’s massive and sustained intervention in the Earth system. For the background, Guariglia printed polystyrene (a widely available and inexpensive mass market plastic) with a top view of the Arctic ice. The photograph was taken as part of a collaboration by the artist with NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland Mission, which studies the extent to which Greenland’s ice melt is caused by the oceans warming. The work is provocative inasmuch as it toys with the notion of the end of the world in the face of the climate crisis. But it is also an incentive to rethink the future and put an end to the human activity responsible for the climate crisis, namely the exploitation of nature.

Justin Brice Guariglia, born 1974, lives in New York City, USA.