To Me

A photographic installation by Italian born artist Paola Pivion on the disused platform in London Underground’s busy Gloucester Road station. The installation comprised three large-scale images of zebras standing in a landscape of mountains and snow.

To make these images, Pivi transported two zebras to the Italian National Park of Velino Sirente to be photographed against the backdrop of the mountains there. The work is one of several that she had produced where animals are pictured in unexpected places. A donkey riding in a small boat was the focus of one earlier image. It was reproduced banner size and hung high on the side of a building in Venice for the Venice Biennial, 2003, and in Brown University, Providence, USA, in 2004. Like the image of the zebras in the snow though, it’s hard to say what it might mean.

Paola Pivi’s projects arise out of fleeting ideas that she realises through a process of organising and performing a vast range of tasks. The end results, whether photographs or works in other media, often place the familiar in unlikely combinations to reveal something absurd, enigmatic or humorous but frequently beautiful. Presented in Gloucester Road Underground station, Tube users will have encountered something unexpected as part of their journeys.

About the artist
Paola Pivi (born 1971) is an artist whose practice is diverse and enigmatic. Commingling the familiar with the alien, Pivi often works with commonly identifiable objects which are modified to introduce a new scale, material or color, challenging the audience to change their point of view. Animals are often cast as protagonists in Pivi’s world. She draws upon their perceived characteristics and instills them with human mannerisms. In Pivi’s art, Polar bears practice yoga, hang from trapezes, and engage with one another. Sprouting multicolored feathers, the artworks are both life-sized and miniaturized as baby bears. Spanning sculpture, video, photography, performance and installation, Pivi’s practice trespasses perceived limits to make possible what before seemed impossible. Zebras frolic in the arctic, goldfish fly on airplanes, and in her 2012 Public Art Fund installation, a Piper Seneca airplane was lifted on its wingtips and installed to constantly rotate forward.

Commissioned by Art on the Underground