ALTROVE – Abstractism

Description

Exhibition curated by Altrove

Catalog curators
Paola Pompili and Massimo Scrocca

Texts by Chiara Pietropaoli and Edoardo Suraci

Photography Angelo Jaroszuk Bogasz

Varsi Editions

Printed in January, 2017
96 pages
14,8 x 21 cm

Not Available

Artist info

108

108 (Guido Bisagni) was born in Alessandria in 1978. He started painting approaching traditional graffiti, using several pseudonyms. At the end of the 90s, he has evolved both formally and conceptually and he becomes one of the first European post-graffiti artists working with abstract forms, painting large and mysterious figures that invade abandoned spaces. He was the first writer to use numbers instead of letters for his name. His work has appeared on the streets of Milan, Paris, London, Berlin, New York City, and San Francisco... It was his firm intention to make visual chaos, working also with 3D objects, sounds, and installations. In 2004 he was invited to Paris for Nusign 2.4 One of the first international exhibitions of street art and in 2005 he took part to the Urban Edge Show in Milan. Finally, in 2006 he graduated from the Polytechnic of Milan following design courses. in 2007 he was invited to join the project called Walls inside the Biennale di Venezia. In March 2008 he flew to Los Angeles with Eltono, Dem, Microbo, and other artists to represent Europe in the U.S.A. during the Nomadaz exhibition. "As the street-art boom gained momentum during the early years of the twenty-first century, however, 108 found himself becoming increasingly dismayed by the often banal route it appeared to be taking. In contradistinction, he started to re-explore the abandoned buildings and factories in Alessandria that he had frequented during his youth. The combination of stark concrete walls and rationalist architecture he encountered there, together with the practical necessity of producing something both cheaply and quickly (a factor that had also inspired his use of adhesive stickers), led to the next stage in his artistic journey, what we might call 108’s “black period.” (Rafael Schacter in His "World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti") Whether it be within the confines of a small room in the abandoned monastery, where the large triangular constructions are most effective and have the effect of warping and playing with the room’s dimensions as the viewer attempts to back away and comprehend the pieces, or as a surreal floating void on a wall beside a busy road. Colors appear again like small pieces that sleep inside the black. 108 collects many solo exhibitions around Italy and Europe, he took part in many of the contemporary festivals and exhibitions like the first Biennale of Urban Art in Moscow (2014) or Mapping the City at the Somerset house of London (2015).

Artist info

2501

Milan-born artist 2501 works in a wide variety of mediums, including painting, installation, sculpture, photography, and film. Embarked in a quest for blank spaces, 2501 experiments with lines, shapes, and motion in free compositions that show strictness all the while breaking art codes. At the age of 20, he settled in Sao Paulo to teach painting to shantytown children, after studying Cinema and video editing in Milan and Visual Communication at the New Bahaus University of Weimar, Germany. His multidisciplinary approach led him to take on a documentary approach which evolved toward the Nomadic Experiment project, a series of international exhibitions, and a decennial digital archive focused around countercultures, communities, points of view, and experiments all over the world. 2501’s site-specific and socially committed work in constant dialogue with urban topography, mainly takes the form of murals, among which specific mural projects carried on in Los Angeles, Miami, Sao Paulo, Milan, Roma, Detroit, Chicago, Ulan Bator, New York, Atlanta, Kyiv. Always on the move due to a career that leads him to answer the calls of various art institutions and fairs around the world, he took part in numerous public art festivals like O.BRA, Living Walls, ALTrove, Art United Us, Artmossphere Biennale, Walk&Talk, Wabash Arts Corridor, Outdoor, Mural, Traffic Design, Painted the Desert Project. His art and process serve as an investigative conduit between an individual who has absorbed a number of principles from classical art and the application of them in a contemporary environment. He enjoyed many solo shows, among which La Macchina, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lissone, On the Brink of Disaster at Wunderkammern Gallery of Rome, See You On The Other Side and Anatomy of Restlessness at Soze Gallery in Los Angeles, Freedom of Choice at Celaya Brothers Gallery in Mexico City. Utilizing an approach that can be both primitive and sophisticated, the repetition of exploratory and evaluative line work is highlighted by 2501’s sensitivity to the relationship of the exacting details of surface and applicant. Equally important are the dynamics of open-air, empty spaces, and established structures or derelict buildings. The symbiotic relationship between positive and negative space is always at play, as each element swaps real estate back and forth.

Artist info

Alberonero

Alberonero is a designer, painter and sculptor. Born in Lodi (IT) in 1991, at the age of fifteen he started writing poems and experimenting with painting in relationship to the physical space through graffiti technique, playing with letters, shapes and colors. In 2013 he graduated in Interior Design at Politecnico di Milano where he had the chance to merge theory with experience and developed a transversal approach to a creation able to connect thoughts with different disciplines. In 2012 Alberonero started focus on the study of color’s perception and on the research of a code that can minimize the visual language. For six years he intervened in the public space by painting sequences of colors ordered in a geometric grid, as instrument of investigation of the connection between mathematics, poetry and sensation. Since 2017 the interest of the artist moves towards the matter and the creation of devices made of poor materials which are linked to the building and agriculture’s world such as concrete, iron, wood, agricultural nets, but also fabrics, plaster and glass, telling us about a super-natural reality. The practice of construction finds form in these elements, in installations born from a careful listening of the site, by the will to "be place", to erase boundaries between the self and the outside and participate in the space in a poetic way. Alberonero realized installation projects, exhibitions and workshops in Italy and in different Countries all around the world including France, Ukraine, Spain, Poland, Germany, Indonesia, United States and Saudi Arabia.

Artist info

Ciredz

Roberto Ciredz was born in 1981 on the southeast coast of Sardinia, where nature is strong and almost brutal, and which requires one’s full surrender in order not to suffer from its strength. Yellow, green and blue dominates the island, where winds blow violently, molding shapes and mixing tones. The graphic design of forms and chromatic progressions has thus become a constant in the artist’s work. In time, Ciredz felt the need to develop an active relationship with his land, fascinated by its uninhabited spaces, fragments of the desolate landscape where men’s traces tend to disappear, overwhelmed by the ever-persistent nature. Hence his choice to paint small abstract interventions on uninhabited ruins in the countryside, which become “volumes” in the artist’s intimate dialogue with space. As Ciredz says: I love to think that those actions will be seen only by very few people. Crucial to his activity is his move to Bologna, where he attends the Academy of Fine Arts and specializes in Graphic Arts. For the first time, he finds himself in permanent contact with an industrialized city. The regular presence of cement replaces his familiar rural elements, which survive only in hidden parts of the city. For Ciredz mural surfaces become a place for a shared and non-exclusive painting dialogue. The artist now expresses himself in public spaces, creating large-scale sections of nature on concrete sections. With his paintings he creates a symbolic relationship between the aesthetic components of the works and the surroundings in which they are placed; the same applies to his sculptures through his specific choice and combination of materials.

Artist info

Graphic Surgery

Graphic Surgery is a collaborative art duo of Dutch artists Erris Huigens and Gysbert Zijlstra, who share the same passion for graphic, graffiti, modern cities and urban environments. Born 4 days apart from each other, in 1978, Erris and Gysbert discovered this mutual source of inspiration during their educative years at an art academy, and started collaborating in 2000. The work of Graphic Surgery includes paintings and mixed media on canvas, murals in abandoned places and spaces, videos and installations, all created in their signature systematic style of diagonal lines, abstract geometric planes and a mostly monochromatic black and white scheme. Some elements are recurring in their works, such as linear industrial structures and construction cranes. Main focus of their art is on material, depth and layering, and very limited use of color. Different forms and productions of Graphic Surgery owe as much to the urban environment that surrounds them as they do to the history of modern art and design, with De Stijl and Constructivism being clear reference points. Their work has been exhibited in numerous group shows and street art festivals throughout the Netherlands, and also in Paris, Brussels, and Luxemburg. At the moment, Graphic Surgery duo is collaborating on various projects with interaction and multimedia artists. In addition, they run the design agency EHGZ. Graphic Surgery duo is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Artist info

Sbagliato

SBAGLIATO is an art project founded in 2011 by three Roman architects and designers, which stems from the desire to generate interferences in the urban fabric, creating “gaps” within the rigid order of architectures.

This need is expressed and carried out through the use of posters, perfect means of communication thanks to their ephemeral nature and mimetic qualities, which are also distinctive features of the group’s vision.

SBAGLIATO’s visionary installations are the result of a synergy between architecture, graphics, photography and collage, through which architectural elements can be “sampled”, processed and re-presented in an urban context, in an heterogeneous but not random manner.

In recent years SBAGLIATO have participated to numerous public art manifestations including Life Is Beautiful in Las Vegas, L’ALT!rove Festival in Catanzaro, Cheap Festival in Bologna, the Memorie Urbane Street Art Festival in Gaeta and many other events around the world.

In 2012 SBAGLIATO presented their first solo exhibition at 999Contemporary in Rome and the following year they were selected for the Collicola On The Wall project at Palazzo Collicola, the Visual Arts Museum of Spoleto, where they created a permanent installation. In 2015 they exhibited at the historical Galleria Toselli in Milan and participated to the traveling group show Eterotopia, presented at Palazzo Fazzari, in Catanzaro and the Ex Dogana in Rome, where in 2016 they took part to the exhibition Il Paradiso Inclinato, next to major artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Sol LeWitt.

Artist info

STEN LEX

Sten (Rome, 1982) and Lex (Taranto, 1982) realized the first stencil in the streets of Rome in 2001 and are considered among the main diffusers of "Stencil Graffiti" in Italy. The duo is known internationally for having introduced, since 2002, the use of halftone in the stencil process. The graphic elaboration, which they call Hole School, consists in cutting out an image composed of dots or lines: a portrait appears so realistic from a distance, abstract from close up. The subjects of their works are anonymous characters, photographed by themselves or rediscovered in old photographic archives, painted in a black and white stencil, and the result of research on Western photographic portraits from the '60s until today. In 2008, Banksy invited Sten Lex to participate in the Cans Festival in London together with a group of artists specialized in "Stencil Graffiti". Starting from 2010, Sten Lex create stencils cut out on paper and glued on the walls. After years of using both stencil and poster media, the duo created a process they call Stencil Poster. The process consists of posting on the street, a poster made up of lines or dots. The poster is hand cut out on the wall on which it is applied, the paper matrix once cut out, is painted black and finally destroyed to give space to the final work. The concept behind this process is that atmospheric agents, rain, and wind slowly destroy the matrix over time, revealing the final artwork as the matrix dissolves.  The essential meaning of the "stencil", which is considered a technique for reproducing the same image over and over again, is thus brought to the point of paradox in that by destroying the matrix, which is also part of the work, its reproducibility is diminished. Sten Lex’s art is spread all around the world. The work of the duo can be admired on the walls of Austin (TX), Gibellina (IT), Bangkok (THA), Monterrey (MX), and many other cities worldwide. During these almost 20 years of activity, Sten Lex exhibited at the Danysz Gallery of Shanghai, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (IT), the Caradente Museum in Spoleto (IT), the Centre de la Gravure et de l’Impage imprimée (BE), the Street Art Museum in Saint Petersburg (RU) and La Condition Publique in Roubaix (FR).

Artist info

TELLAS

Tellas was born in 1985 in Cagliari, Sardinia. His artistic journey begins in the harsh lands where he grew up. His work is a personal and intimate vision of the natural elements defining the landscape around him. Each piece is the result of a meditative process combining spatial qualities, shapes, and species of the surrounding environment. He expresses his style through various means. His use of drawing, painting, printing techniques, installations, and audio-video production confirms his aim to create and experiment with different art forms. He participated in many international events. Among the most remarkable there are the La Tour Paris Project, 2013, considered one of the most innovative contemporary art projects worldwide, and Artmossphere, the first Street Art Biennale held in Moscow in 2014, featuring 70 artists from all over the world. In 2015 his work appeared in The Urban Contemporary Art Guide, edited by the Graffiti Art Magazine, where he ranked amongst the world’s best 100 emerging artists of 2015. The same year he completed an extensive public artwork in Cagliari, the Italian Capital of Culture back then. In Rome, he took part in Here, Now, the sixth edition of the city’s Outdoor Festival, while his personal show Clima Estremo was held at Wunderkammern Gallery. The following year he completed several important public artworks in Spain, Finland, and Australia, respectively in Madrid, Helsinki, Albany, and Perth. In 2017 he was in Australia again, working on the mural The Barrier in Townsville, Queensland. Later that year, this piece inspired his exhibition Tropico, held at the Magma Gallery, Bologna. Again in Bologna, in 2019, he exhibited his solo exhibition "Lago" with a new body of works curated by the Magma Gallery. In 2019, together with the Press Press editions, he published "notes" a collection of 180 drawings in a limited edition of only 300 copies. Since 2019 he has confirmed the collaboration with The Jaunt, an important international organization that represents artists from all over the world, involving them in large-scale outdoor projects, institutional exhibitions, and works productions. With The Jaunt, Tellas exhibited in San Francisco at the Legion Project Art Gallery, then in Amsterdam in 2021 at the STRAAT Museum on the occasion of the solo exhibition “Out There Somewhere”.  In 2020 he was invited by Paratissima Art Fair to create a work on a large surface that covers the courtyard of the Centro d'Arte Contemporanea Artiglieria, on the occasion of its reopening in Turin, in the circuit of the important exhibition of Artissima. In addition to Palermo, Rome, and other Italian cities, the latest works can be found in Atlanta (USA), Klaipeda (Lithuania), Delhi (India), Montreal (Canada), and Kaohsiung (Taiwan), France, Ireland, and Spain. His artistic production also includes significant partnerships with important Italian fashion brands, including Ferragamo and Marni. In particular, the multiple collaborations with Marni resulted in the documentary A grande terra do Sertão, presented at the 56th Venice Biennale.

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