On the occasion of ArtVerona 2018 (12-15 October), BeAdvisors Art Department is offering to its collectors an overview of the current Italian cultural scene.
By cherry-picking artists from each of the fair’s sections, and looking at all the 150 booths of Italian galleries, the purpose is to provide an overview of the art market with a focus on young Italian galleries.
MARCO MARIA ZANIN
Marignana Arte, Venice (IT)
Padova (Italy) 1983
Lives and works between Padova and São Paulo
Zanin’s artworks highlight the need to “leave” a superficial vision of contemporaneity so it can be understood in a deeper and more comprehensive way.
In recent years, Marco Maria Zanin has been developing his work within two diametrically opposing contexts, which carry a profound symbiotic relation between each other: the rural landscape of Veneto, the region in Northern Italy where the artist’s family originates, and the city of São Paulo, where Zanin has spent long periods of time, fascinated by the megalopolis’ totally distinct temporality.
By placing himself – both conceptually and physically – on the edge of these two worlds, the artist witnesses and reveals the clash of two world visions that are radically distinct and apparently irreconcilable, but that coexist despite all and, mainly, despite the common places on contemporaneity.
In his classic Hybrid Cultures (1990), Argentinian anthropologist Nestor García Canclini proposes “strategies for entering and leaving modernity”.
Zanin’s artworks highlight the need to “leave” a superficial vision of contemporaneity so it can be understood in a deeper and more comprehensive way.
Ritualia is a series of photographs and installations produced during an artist’s residence in the eastern part of the Veneto region in northern Italy organized by Humus interdisciplinary Residence, a platform founded in 2015 under which international artists are invited to reinterpret local identities in rural and marginal areas in Veneto.
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Marco Maria Zanin
Sette Lune
2018
fine art print on cotton paper, crafted linen paper
120 x 150 cm
MARTA MANCINI
Matèria Gallery, Rome
Born in 1981
Lives and works in Rome
Marta Mancini’s recent work investigates aesthetical and psychological dynamics within the creation of pictorial space. Her paintings are the result of a long, intuitive accumulation of brushstrokes, that later are manipulated with a subtraction process. Each “blob” of paint left visible becomes organic presence, like a character that contributes to compose a new space. Intuition and rationality, logic and paradox, humor and solemnity, clarity and whisper. The tension in the complex surfaces of Mancini is a way to reflect on the double essence of painting, as illusion and object, and re-activates aesthetic categories such as beauty, grotesque, representation and equality.
Marta Mancini’s recent work investigates aesthetical and psychological dynamics within the creation of pictorial space. Her paintings are the result of a long, intuitive accumulation of brushstrokes, that later are manipulated with a subtraction process. Each “blob” of paint left visible becomes organic presence, like a character that contributes to compose a new space. Intuition and rationality, logic and paradox, humor and solemnity, clarity and whisper. The tension in the complex surfaces of Mancini is a way to reflect on the double essence of painting, as illusion and object, and re-activates aesthetic categories such as beauty, grotesque, representation and equality.
JONNY BRIGGS
Ncontemporary, London and Milan
Born in 1985, London, UK
Lives and works in London, UK
The artist describes himself and his work as follows:
“In search of “parts of my childhood, I endeavor to think outside of the reality I was socialised into and create a new one with my parents and self. Through this I reference the discovery of my individuality and question the distance between us, between adult and child, love and resentment, expressed and reserved, real and fake, in an attempt to revive my unconditioned, uninhibited self. Striving to escape my closing adult mind, photomontage, the cartoonesque and the performative allow me to escape the normal, and question my beliefs, to recapture childhood nature through my cultured adult eyes.
“Into the Black is a photograph of a circular hole cut through a domestic scene. Behind there is a blue-screen backdrop, traditionally used for super-imposing in films and photographs, yet I decided to leave it unedited, as the honest underneath, of what’s not usually seen.
A found image from my family archive of my Father as a child peeps over the periphery of the hole, and his own face is painted blue, almost invisible in the shadows of the bottom left side of the hole. Yet contradictingly it is often assumed that this piece is edited or montaged, but it is not.”
Jonny exhibited his works in different institutions, galleries, and collections, such as Saatchi Gallery (London), Photo Museum of Biel, Fondazione di Fotografia in Modena, Zabludowicz Collection (London), Benaki Museum Athens.
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- Into the Black, 2011
126 x 121cm,
Photography; C-type
Lambda print aluminium
mounted and framed
in black
IRENE FENARA
Galleria UNA, Piacenza
Born in Bologna, 1990
Lives and works in Bologna
Self Portrait from Surveillance Camera:
The interest in the theories of visual culture and the need to appropriate the instruments of contemporaneity, which determine our way of seeing, become for Irene Fenara the starting point for practicing observation and reflection on images. Using an instrument that is usually extraneous to art, a surveillance cameras that acquire images for the sole purpose of environmental control, Irene Fenara relates power and vision. The work bears the traces of a move- ment, that of the artist who goes from the studio to the surveillance camera and then saves the image that portrays her before the continuous flow cancels it 24 hours later. The artist’s gaze, turned towards the objective, becomes an act of resistance to impose its identity on the controlled world. It is a reversed point of view that, however, makes us re flect on the always reversible relationship between the observer and the observer.
Recent exhibitions she has participated include: Around me. Traces of presence in biopolscapes , F4/Un’idea di fotografa, Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Pieve di Soligo, Treviso, 2018; Supervision , BACO, Bergamo, 2018 (solo); That’s IT! Sull’ultima generazione di artisti in Italia a un metro e ottanta dal confine , MAMbo, Bologna, 2018; L’altro sguardo. Fotografe italiane 1965 – 2018 , Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma, 2018, Searching for myself through remote skins , Galleria Renata Fabbri, Milano, 2018; Le interne differenze , P420, Bologna, 2017 (solo); Essere politico, Fondazione Fotografia Modena, 2017; Give me yesterday, Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milano, 2016. Irene is among the shortlisted artists for the Premio Citta di Treviglio 2018 and in 2015 she was shortlisted for the Premio Francesco Fabbri per le Arti Contemporanee. Since 2012, she is artist in residence at the Fondazione Collegio Artistico Venturoli, Bologna, where she has her studio.
SPAZIOBUONASERA
(Turin)
Founded in Turin in 2015 by
Lula Broglio, Ottavia Plazza, Edoardo Piermattei, Erik Saglia, Marco Schiavone, Francesco Snote, Alice Visentin
On the occasion of Art Verona 2018, Spaziobuonasera presents its first limited edition (20 items) wax pastels, completely handcrafted. The 14 wax pastels have been produced by the seven components of the artists group (two colours each), and the wooden box includes a limited edition poster showing the making process.
The final manufacture wants to be the physical representation of a pictorial technique booklet. The creation of artistic tools seen as the research of a practical knowledge and of experimentation within the pictorial technique. The item is an artwork/collective art object. The box can be booked now and purchased starting from next week.
Spaziobuonasera is a Turin-based project founded in 2015 by artists Lula Broglio, Edoardo Piermattei, Ottavia Plazza, Erik Saglia, Marco Schiavone, Francesco Snote and Alice Visentin. They are all emerging under30, all developing their own careers independently from Spaziobuonasera, working on different media (painting, sculpture, installation, photography). Spaziobuonasera is an artist-run space which works as exhibiting venue for both founders’ solo shows and other exhibitions involving Italian and International emerging artists. Research and curatorial aspects are all managed by artists.
