SUNRISE: Daniela Astone

For a full year, the Italian painter Daniela Astone rose before dawn every day to paint the sunrise. She began on October 8, 2020, on the eve of Italy's second lockdown, and painted the last one on October 7, 2021, a week before the show opened. SUNRISE hung all 365 small oil panels side by side on one long wall, in the order they were made, so that a whole year of mornings could be taken in at once.

Each panel is titled by its date. The show asked what one day means in the span of a year, and how we hold on to serene moments in a year of such turmoil, and collectors were encouraged to look for a date that meant something to them: a birthday, an anniversary, a milestone. In her statement on the title wall, Astone wrote, "Every change, every challenge, begins with imagining how it may pass, how the new day may dawn."

Astone (b. 1980, Pisa) moved to Florence at 18 to study illustration at the International School of Comics, then turned to painting and drawing at the Florence Academy of Art under Daniel Graves, where in 2013 she became director of the intermediate program. In 2016 her work entered the permanent collection of the Contemporary Art Museum in Sicily. The exhibition opened with an evening reception on October 14, 2021.