One of the first things you see when you visit Memories of the Future, the new exhibition at Frieze No.9 Cork Street curated by 16Arlington’s creative director Marco Capaldo (presented by Almine Rech), are two polaroids of orchids shot by Andy Warhol in 1980. The extravagance of the flowers’ fleshy petals and the elegant cut of their fluid forms against their white background emphasise the strange, primordial beauty of a plant that dates back to the twilight of the dinosaurs. At the same, the harsh light, the glimpse of the humble plastic pot in the corner frame, the mixture of glamour and messiness that is classic Warhol, makes the images epochally modern. In front of them you feel, all at once, that you are looking at something very old and very new.
For Capaldo, this interplay of the past and the future unites each of the fourteen pieces he selected for his first exhibition. ‘I've always been really intrigued by the way our memories are altered by change as we move forward into our futures,’ Capaldo tells me. ‘I think so many tools exist in this modern world to capture memories in their accuracy and I really wanted to investigate that. But in addition, I also really wanted to investigate the subjectivity behind memories.’
