White Box is pleased to present an exhibition featuring Heinrich Nicolaus, an internationally renowned painter, publisher, and multimedia artist based in Chianti, Italy.

Rare, subtle and timeless, Heinrich Nicolaus (“21”) takes as subject the communal process of art-making through extended dialogues with the art historian and scientist Wolf Guenter Thiel and curator Juan Puntes, as well as through the collaboration of a variety of contemporary local and international artists, architects, musicians, film and video makers, new media artists, writers, actors, fashionistas, magicians, etc. Nicolaus also highlights the ideas of experts on Renaissance Art and Theory, including Max Seidel, Silvana Seidel Menchi and Gabrielle Perretta, and incorporates historical information furnished by archaeologist, Lucia Donnini, and architect Francis Levine who reference and postulate a time when art provided for and explored undifferentiated notions of science, spirituality and magic.

Inspired by Giulio Camillo’s Il Teatro della Memoria created in 1530, the multidisciplinary collaborative theater piece (“21”) depicts processes and events of the present world crisis related to the imbalance between the soul and the world (anima mundis) as a backdrop for a multitude of new and inspiring actions, and endeavors. Nicolaus reflects to some extent upon the influential, communal attitude found in Paul Thek’s collaborative artworks produced in the Low Countries during his exiled European years following completion of his critical work “The Tomb-Death of a Hippie”.

(“21”) opens in Venice in early June as a matrix to Detournement ‘09, a multifarious, roundabout collateral 53rd Biennale Project. For its concurrent run at White Box – Bowery, a selective New York and international group of artists and collaborators from other disciplines will cooperate throughout the entire Summer.

Locations participating outside the two main gallery spaces in Venice and New York are libraries, social networks, academia and Websites where the public can join in and have their voice and opinion count, as in Act II, Selectio, a selection process of artworks and ideas for the theater.

The attachment provided serves as a script and ultimate guide to the three acts of the piece: Adcumulum (accumulation/collecting), Selectio (selective criteria), Propagus (propaganda/messenger of image-agents), and also comprises a Postcriptum consisting of hundreds of drawings, objects, sculptures, and architecto-pictorial works organized in three singular segments in multiples of seven, hence, (“21”). Each act serves as a vehicle to guide the search for magic and spirituality through art.