FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 2, 2026

Rhea Marmentini

Bird Motion Project

Immersive convergence of Monumental Paintings, Sculpture, Estofado, Ceramics, Live Marble Sculpting & Projected Painting Animations with C51N05

Curated by Jonathan Shorr

May 16 - June 29 2026

At the 2026 Garner Arts Festival, Rhea Marmentini arrives less like an exhibiting artist and more like a geological event. In Building 5, 2nd Floor, Marmentini unveils her monumental Bird Motion Project—an immersive convergence of colossal paintings, white marble sculptures, ceramic works, and projected painting animations co-directed with animation artist C51N05. Outside, beside the waterfall, she will sculpt stone live in real time, transforming raw matter into myth before the public’s eyes.

Marmentini’s practice exists in the rare territory where ancient civilization, industrial force, and ecstatic imagination collide. A stone sculptor trained in Hungary and France and spiritually linked to the lineage of monumental European sculpture; she approaches marble not as passive material but as compressed time itself. “I see sculpting as a silent form of making music,” Marmentini writes. “Stone is a dense, massive accumulation of millions of years—a physical manifestation of time itself.” Her live carving performance at Garner makes that philosophy physical. Audiences will witness the passion, discipline, rhythm, and transcendence of direct sculpting as marble, dust, gravity, and human force converge beside the rushing waterfall.

To understand Marmentini’s work is to understand gravity—not merely as physics but as destiny. Her sculptures appear excavated from forgotten futures. Her monumental paintings behave like weather systems or battlefields, surfaces scratched and liberated through velocity, abrasion, and impact. Pigment becomes sediment. Light appears unearthed rather than painted. Her canvases do not depict myth; they generate it.

The Bird Motion Project expands this vision into a total environment. Monumental Estofado-inspired paintings and ceramics will occupy Building 5 as if remnants from a lost civilization had erupted into the Hudson Valley. Suspended throughout the installation are projected animations co-directed by C51N05, the Hungarian animator based in Buenos Aires, whose practice merges stop-motion, natural textures, experimental mixed techniques, and patterns drawn from nature. A graduate of MOME University of Art and Design in Budapest, C51N05 transforms Marmentini’s paintings into shifting apparitions of flight, metamorphosis, erosion, and rebirth. Together, the artists create a cinematic ecology where sculpture breathes, paintings mutate, and birds become metaphysical carriers between dimensions.

Marmentini’s growing international recognition reflects the singularity of her vision. Her work has been associated with sculpture symposiums and exhibitions across Europe and the United States, while recent gallery texts have described her forms as “timeless shapes capable of transcending cultures and eras.” Other writings characterize her sculptures as dialogues between raw matter and enduring essence, combining ancient techniques with mythic imagination.

Yet no online image fully communicates the physical authority of the work itself. Seen in person, Marmentini’s sculptures possess the startling psychological weight of relics from a civilization both prehistoric and futuristic. They stand with the immovability of monuments while remaining emotionally volatile—objects that seem discovered rather than manufactured. Her paintings operate similarly: enormous psychic terrains where motion and illumination become inseparable.

Garner Arts Festival 2026 and Upstate Arts Weekend position Marmentini within one of the Hudson Valley’s most adventurous artistic landscapes, where historic industrial architecture, creekside performances, dance, sculpture, sound, and installation dissolve boundaries between disciplines. But Marmentini’s presence threatens to eclipse the ordinary language of “festival” altogether. This is not merely an exhibition. It is an encounter with scale, permanence, erosion, and time.

In an age obsessed with speed and digital disappearance, Rhea Marmentini insists on the opposite: weight, endurance, myth, and geological memory. She hacks the timeline with hammer, chisel, and grinder, engineering impossible futures from stone older than humanity itself.

Artist information: Rhea Marmentini Official Website

For further information and images contact GARNER Arts Center Curator at Large at jsgalleryinfo@gmail.com

By Appointment Only upon request by email: jsgalleryinfo@gmail.com and call/text: 646-821-7095