The five must-see exhibitions of this week will accompany us throughout the beautiful season, until September 2022: they offer various points of reflection such as irony, precariousness and evanescence, both sacrilegious and innovative art, and finally video installations.
Giuseppe Veneziano True Stories at Palazzo Pallavicini until September 18, 2022
Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna is inaugurating the exhibition with an ultra-pop character, Giuseppe Veneziano True Stories, curated by Valerio Dehò.
The exhibition is characterized by the ironic and provocative approach that has always distinguished the work of Giuseppe Veneziano.
Featured in Veneziano’s canvases are famous public figures to whom the various thematic sections are dedicated.
The artist also portrays himself as the Mona Lisa, imitates Dalí who in turn mimics Velázquez while painting Snow White; Spiderman takes the place of Jeff Koons and the Girl with a Pearl Earring takes a nude selfie.
Giuseppe Veneziano True Stories emerges as a successful meeting between past, present, and future thanks to comic book superheroes and myths of the past meeting those of the present, all seasoned with various incursions into art history, from Goya to Raphael.
A pop, colorful, and lively exhibition like a great party, where politically correct is banned.
CHRISTIAN FROSI THE EMPTY ROOM at GAMeC until September 25, 2022
The GAMeC in Bergamo dedicates to Christian Frosi the exhibition The Empty Room, curated by Nicola Ricciardi.
The exhibition presents over 30 works, created in just over ten years of activity, that tell the themes of transience, precariousness, fleetingness, and evanescence, constant elements in his artistic production.
Since 2012, Frosi has decided to gradually withdraw from the scene until he becomes practically unreachable. He stops being an artist: he chooses not to produce, not to participate, to withdraw from the history of art, its circumstances, and its actors.
The artist has previously exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, also participating in the first Triennale of Turin in 2005, in Sindrome Italiana, the young Italian artistic creation at the Magasin – Centre National d’Art contemporain in Grenoble in 2010, up to Fuoriclasse, the exhibition at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan.
The desire to exhibit his first solo exhibition today arises mainly from the need to protect, preserve, and pass on his work.
THE BAIT at Macte in Termoli until September 11, 2022
The Macte in Termoli opens the exhibition L’ESCA which until September 11 presents thirty works from a private collection in the rooms of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Termoli.
Among the artists featured, we note: Mario Airò, Stefano Arienti, Monica Bonvicini, Maurizio Cattelan, Miltos Manetas, Eva Marisaldi, Liliana Moro, Paola Pivi, Alessandra Tesi, Vedovamazzei, Luca Vitone, Sislej Xhafa and many others.
The title ESCA refers to the relationship between collector and artist, which often begins with a love at first sight for the artwork. This exhibition is also a demonstration of how close relationships between the collector and the artist can be established through frequent visits to artists’ studios, galleries, and exhibition spaces in various Italian cities.
The exhibition primarily investigates the artistic research of representatives of Italian art from the 1990s: a journey through the history of art spanning forty years and a unique opportunity to discover works that narrate critical, playful, and narcissistic approaches, all sharing a discomfort with traditional materials and techniques in favor of a dissociative and introspective vein.
Utopia by Kazumi Yoshida at the Loggiato di San Bartolomeo in Palermo until July 30, 2022
The Loggiato di San Bartolomeo hosts Utopia by Kazumi Yoshida, a contemporary designer among the most famous in the world and art director of Clarence House.
Utopia takes shape in Palermo, a city defined by the artist as a dream, and it is the first major retrospective of the master in Italy.
Many of the works exhibited here are unpublished, and some among tapestries and paintings have been specially created in homage to the Sicilian city. In particular, Utopia, the large work from which the exhibition takes its title, was created by Kazumi Yoshida in New York and completed in Palermo, in collaboration with students from the Academy of Fine Arts. A tribute to the vitality that the artist perceived while visiting the city.
Kazumi Yoshida creates works of art and then translates them into fabric and wallpaper, or vice versa. His works reflect the influence of Jean Cocteau, Raoul Dufy, Fernand Léger, Marie Laurencin, Picasso, and Matisse. His inspiration comes from art but also from nature and fashion.
Candice Breitz: Never Ending Stories at the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive – Palazzina dei Giardini until September 18, 2022
FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive presents Candice Breitz: Never Ending Stories.
The exhibition, the largest dedicated so far by an Italian institution to the South African artist, is held at the Palazzina dei Giardini in Modena.
Candice Breitz, an artist of South African origin but residing in Germany, is currently one of the most internationally recognized. In 2017, she also represented South Africa at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Candice Breitz: Never Ending Stories presents three installations: Love Story (2016), Digest (2020), and Labour (2020) and reflects on the crucial role that storytelling plays in the construction of lived reality, offering the possibility of alternative future realities.
The exhibition is a way out of the temporal acceleration we experience daily, primarily due to the spiral of the economy we live in and the compulsive relationship established with social media, which have become our tool for understanding and measuring the world.
Love Story instead questions us about the loss of nuance and empathy that occurs when complex stories are condensed and abbreviated to serve increasingly shorter attention spans.
The work develops through interviews with six people who have left their homeland for religious, political, or humanitarian reasons: Sarah Mardini, who escaped the war in Syria, José Maria João, a former child soldier from Angola, Mamy MalobaLanga, a survivor of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Shabeena Saveri, an Indian transgender activist, Luis Nava Molero, a political dissident from Venezuela, and Farah Abdi Mohamed, a young Somali atheist.
In the first room, fragments of the interviews are reenacted by Hollywood actors Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore and edited together, while in the second space, the interviews are projected in their entirety.
