ARCO Madrid

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani on 9 October 1924. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo.
In 1946, she moved to Rome with Antonio Sanfilippo where she met Pietro Consagra and Giulio Turcato.
In 1947 she completed her first abstract painting, entitled Scomposizione. In March of the same year she launched the Forma Group (“Forma 1” would be the name of the first and only issue of the magazine-manifesto) with Attardi, Consagra, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli, Sanfilippo, and Turcato. In 1948 she took part for the first time in the 24^th Venice Biennale, as well as in the exhibition “Abstract Art in Italy” at the Galleria di Roma. In 1954 she met Michel Tapié, whose support marketed a watershed moment for the artist. The French critic placed her among the protagonists of his theory of art autre, alongside Burri, Capogrossi and Fontana.
The 1960s were a time of major stylistic changes. Much more vivid and varied tones of color reappeared, while the sign underwent a change in structure. The first chromatic works were shown at the Parma Gallery in New York and at the New Vision Center Gallery in London with a presentation by Lionello Venturi, in 1961.
In 1964 she was invited with a personal room to the 32^nd Venice Biennale.
These years saw the first works created on sicofoil, a transparent plastic material used for the first time for art. Works from this period include Tenda (1965), Ambiente Arancio (1967) and Triplice tenda (1969-71). The following decade was dedicated to continuous experimentation with sicofoil. Colors became less strong, with pastels sometimes dominating. By the mid-1970s the sicofoil was completely transparent, in twisting braids that emphasized the support and made the frame the protagonist (in a studied “ostension of the support and the frame” she would say, which certainly has a flavor touching on the conceptual).
In 1976 was presented Triplice tenda at the 37^th Venice Biennale in the “Arte Ambiente” section. In the 1980s, Accardi returned to canvas, which she left raw: it would be animated with colored signs, which had become very large, inside of which there might be just one color. In 1983 she exhibited at the Pinacoteca Comunale
in Ravenna and at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan; while in 1988 she was once again invited with a personal room to the 43^rd Venice Biennale, where she presented large-scale works. The next year she was represented by two historical works at the “Italian Art in the 20th Century” show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In 1994 a far-ranging retrospective open at the Castello di Rivoli; in the same year she took part in the exhibition “The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Among the many solo shows and retrospectives, two big anthological exhibitions opened in Paris Parigi, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2002) and in Rome, at the MA-CRO (2004).
In 2011 the show “Carla Accardi. Segno e trasparenza” opened at the Fondazione Puglisi di Catania; for this occasion important historical works were exhibited on the two great floors of Palazzo Valle. In the meantime two volumes of the monumental catalogue of her works were released, curated by Germano Celant, published by Charta and Silvana respectively. Carla Accardi passed away in Rome on 23 February 2014, but interest in her work has continued to grow, as evidenced by the 2020 solo show Contesti, at the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the group show at the MAXXI Senzamargine Passaggi nell’Arte Italiana a cavallo del Millennio from October 2020 to January 2022, and by her inclusion in the 59^th Venice Biennale scheduled for April 2022.

Armando Andrade Tudela (born 1975, Lima, Peru) is an artist living and working in Lyon, France.
Andrade studied at Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima, Perú, at the Royal College of Art, London, and at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. He was a founding member of the artist-run space and art collective Espacio La Culpable, Lima, Perú (2002-2008).
The artist explores the intersecting interfaces between popular culture, politics and fine art. While frequently using the South American cultural and historical context as his starting point, on a deeper level Andrade Tudela’s work focuses on complex systems of translation and transference; how are aesthetic ideas assimilated and reactivated politically, or socially, at a local level? And more broadly speaking, how are ideas themselves embedded within the fabric of geography and physical topography?
He moves freely among a wide range of media and material. In his in-depth, research-driven projects, he frequently employs quasi-documentary techniques, such as recorded interviews and on-site photographic explorations, combining them with multiple references to history, politics and popular culture. At the same time, his drawings and objects combine visual directness and technical accomplishment with conceptual complexity.
By focusing on sites of temporal and geographic slippage, Andrade Tudela parses the hidden inner rhymes and subtle discordances within cultural history, ultimately undermining and even dismantling the cultural and historic framing structures his work examines.
His work is part of some of the most important international institutional collections such as: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Today he is DNSEP art teacher (volume, installation), co-coordinator Master art, National School of Fine Arts of Lyon.

Matthias Bitzer was born in 1975 in Stuttgart, he lives and works in Berlin (D).
He graduated from Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, Germany in 2004.
His artistic practice combines drawing, sculpture and painting creating experience spaces with strong references to history and intellectuals and a deep reflection on their identity, in which the viewer can immerse himself. The development of his work shows itself in the increasing complexity of the installations, maintaining their focus on the construction of memory and the reconstruction of reality. His research involves literary personalities, writers and their characters who have frequently slipped into outsider positions. Fascinated by the relation between the invisible and the real, Bitzer layers symbolic fragments and fractured forms on top of one another as citations. In a new inspection of classical modern art from today’s perspective, the artist combines portraits and geometric constructions in his drawings, paintings and sculptures. Through the analysis of this multiplicity of figures, Matthias Bitzer’s work investigates different looks on reality and through his more and more complex abstract patterns he gives the viewer a visual translation to this fragmentary dimension, to these different points of view, to possible gazes. Through paintings, sculptures and mural drawings, all strictly connected to each other, he thinks the exhibition space as an autonomous body, where you can “consider the works as a kind of symbolist translation or a decoding of reality that tries to make visible something that was invisible before” as the artist says.
His works are part of Public collections at LACMA, Los Angeles, USA, MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany, Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany, Geraer Sammlung, Gera, Germany, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain, and Rosenblum Collection & Friends, Paris, France.

Elena Damiani was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. She studied Architecture at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas and subsequently transferred to the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Corriente Alterna where she graduated in Fine Arts in 2005. In 2010 she received her Masters in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Elena Damiani employs the disciplines of geology, geography, cartography, archaeology and astronomy to reinterpret such categorisations and our understanding of the physical world around us. Her fictional and constructed landscapes propose alternative readings of geological time, history and humankind’s classifications of evidence. Scientific source material, considered rational and immutable is presented as a cultural construct, subject to interpretation and infused with alternative value systems, redirecting for more poetic and suggestive readings. Damiani’s construction of fictions both emulates and disrupts our methodology of constructing meaning and knowledge via empirical observations. Her work reveals a search to gain understanding of how structures that obey a greater magnitude than the brief passage of man on Earth are composed and work. This search formulates a series of explorations which seek to reinterpret various natural stages and natural processes while confronting us with the idea we have of the world in which we live. Her most recent work explores fractures in time and geological events as symbols of constant change. The artist refers to geological features as indicators of a time before history. To Damiani, geology reveals the memory of the land.
Her work has been exhibited at the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A (2022), Dhaka Art Summit (2020), DePaul Art Museum (2020), MOCO Montpellier Contemporain (2020), Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisboa (2019), la Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma (2019); Skissernas Museum (Lund, 2017); Chrysler Museum of Art, (Virginia; 2017), Gwangju Biennale (2016), Bienal de Cuenca (2016), IV Poly/Graphic Triennial San Juan (2015), Vienna Biennale (2015), Venice Biennale (2015), Museo Amparo (Puebla, 2016); MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (Mexico City, 2015); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2015), MOCAD Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, 2015); Americas Society (New York, 2014), BIM Bienal de la Imagen y Movimiento (Buenos Aires, 2014), Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, 2013), Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, 2013), MAC Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Lima, 2013), Government Art Collection (London, 2012), Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia (2009), MAMBA Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2007), IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (Valencia, 2007), Kunstmuseum (Bonn, 2006).
She was awarded the Grants & Commissions Program Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO (2016), the Commission for a permanent site-specific installation at the Americas Society’s David Rockefeller Atrium in New York (2014), the Special Mention to Video Creation at the International Festival of Digital Arts and Cultures of Gran Canaria (2006), 2nd Prize at the French-Peruvian Contest for Visual Arts Pasaporte para un Artista (2006), the Gold and Silver at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Corriente Alterna (2005), the Production Prize in the 2nd Peruvian Contest Video and Electronic Arts (2004).
Work by the artist is included in international collections, including the MoMA The Museum of Modern Art, MALI Museo de Arte de Lima, GNAM Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Art Jameel Collection, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo Tamayo, Kadist Art Foundation, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Schoepflin Foundation, PAMM Perez Art Museum Miami and FOLA Fototeca Latinoamericana. She currently lives and works in Lima.

Flavio Favelli was born in Florence in 1967, in 1993 he graduated at the University of Bologna with a degree in Oriental Studies, only afterwards beginning his career as an artist. He currently lives and works in Bologna (IT).
His works have been exhibited in prestigious international institutions, including: Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (2022); GAM, Turin (2022); Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Milan (2021); Il bello inverso, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice (2019); Albergo Diurno Venezia, Milan (2017); UNIVERS, A METAPHYSIC STORE, Venice (2017); Art Basel Hong Kong – the Encounters section curated by Yuko Hasegawa (2013); MAXXI, Rome (2015, 2012, 2010); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2012), MACRO, Rome (2012; 2011); RISO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palermo (2011), American Academy in Rome (2011, 2010); Tate Modern, London (2010), MCA, Chicago (2009), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2008; 2007, 2002); Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2008), Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul (2008), Benaki Museum, Athens (2008), La Maison Rouge (2007), MAMBO, Bologna (2007), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes, (2007); Creative Art Center, Beijing (2006); Musèe d’Art Moderne de Saint- Etienne, Saint- Etienne (2005), Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles (2004), Museion – Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bolzano (2003).
In 2012 the artist represented Italy at the 11th Biennale de La Habana and he has twice taken part – in 2003 and in 2013 – in the Venice Biennale. Flavio Favelli was chosen for the residence at the Italian Cultural Institute of Istanbul and in 2014 he had a solo show in the historic complex of the Galata Rum Okulu school.

Flavio Favelli creates works using old objects of décor or everyday use, such as lighting fixtures, picture frames, Fanta or Coca Cola bottles, trinkets that evoke the bourgeois aesthetic of the family environments he grew up in, or the Eastern cultures he studied at university. His works are collages, sculptures or installations in which these recycled materials are brought together, giving life to layers of meaning that isolate the object from its mere material reality, elevating it to an artistic dimension. This transition does not occur through the distortion of the object itself but rather through an amplification of its functional features, of its value as an object of use, as an object of décor, as an icon of the everyday life of the past, unwittingly existing in the present. The marked autobiographical component in these works (which also lies behind the artist’s rare performances), functions as a common filter for interpreting the various lines of inquiry that Flavio Favelli develops in all of his works, and, through a reflection on memory and the development of a “poetics of the object” centered around the exotic-everyday dichotomy, he threads together his own personal story with broader social history and political ideas.
Flavio Favelli’s works a marked sense of Italianness. In his art he develops and reworks the contradictions that came about with the rise of conceptual art (and pop-art) internationally, placing these theoretical frameworks inside the forms and achievements of the Italian conceptual tradition. The result are works with a hybrid soul, which make it difficult to know where to place him on the Italian art scene, and at the same time emphasizing the strong personal element that underlies the language used in each individual work.

Sheila Hicks graduated with a BFA and MFA from Yale University. She was one of just three women to receive a bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of Art in 1957. In May 2019 the artist received an honorary degree from Yale University. She lives and works in Paris, France. Hicks participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, curated by Christine Macel (2017); the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); Glasgow International (2016); Weaving & We, Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art (2016); Whitney Biennial (2014); and São Paulo Biennial (2012).

The artist was awarded the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal in 2010 and was granted an Honorary Doctorate from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 2014.

Recent solo presentations include the major retrospective Sheila Hicks, a little bit of a lot of things, LOK, Kunstmuseum of St. Gallen (2023), SHEILA HICKS: OFF GRID, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield (2022), Thread, trees, river, MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Wien (2020); Campo Abierto (Open Field), The Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2019); Seize, Weave Space, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019); Reencuentro, Museo Chileno de arte Precolombino, Santiago (2019); Lignes de Vie, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); Free Threads, Textile and its Pre-Columbian Roots, 1954-2017, Museo Amparo, Puebla (2017); Sheila Hicks: Apprentissages, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Musée Carnavalet and Nanterre-Amandiers, Paris (2016); Sheila Hicks: Material Voices, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha (2016); Sheila Hicks | Why Not, TextielMuseum, Tilburg (2016); Foray into Chromatic Zones, Hayward Gallery, London (2015); Sheila Hicks – Hors Normes, Sculptures Textiles, Passage de Retz, Paris, France (2010); Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor, Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, New York (2006).

Hicks has created monumental site-specific works for the Ford Foundation Headquarters and Federal Courthouse in New York; The Duke Endowment in Charlotte, North Carolina; King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Hicks has also produced installations for the Grande Rotonde at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2014-15) and as part of the outdoor exhibition Voyage d’hiver in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles (2017).

Hicks’ work is featured in a number of prominent collections including Tate Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Gallery, Washington D.C; Art Institute of Chicago; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; The Jewish Museum, New York; and the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.

Language, geography, historiography are themes that Lagomarsino revisits in his artistc practice, using materials that often evoke memories or a relationship to something, only to ask us to reflect on the conditions enabling these connections.
Lagomarsino’s work points toward the gaps and cracks in our explanation models highlighting language’s precarious foundation. With precise and poetic displacements, the constructs frictions, fractures of blind spots from where to tell other stories. Keenly aware of the conceptual implications of a range of materials and medium, Lagomarsino moves seamlessy between collage, drawing, installation, performance, and video.

Recent solo exhibitions:
The Square Between the Walls, Lunds Konsthall (2021), The Faculty of Seeing, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019), We are each other’s air, Francesca Minini, Milan (2019), EntreMundos, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2018), La Neblina, Galeria Avenida da India, Lisbon (2018).

Selected group exhibitions:
Ninguém teria acreditado, Pina Estação, Sao Paulo 2021, Deep Sounding-Hystory as Multiple Narratives, daadgalerie Berlin (2019), BRAZIL. Knife in the Flesh, PAC, Milan (2018), A Universal History of Infamy, LACMA, Los Angeles, (2017), La Terra Inquieta, Fondazione Trussardi, Milano (2017), Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2014) and Under the Same Sun, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014).
He also partecipated in the Guangzhou Triennial and the Gwangju Biennial (both 2008); the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2015); the Istanbul Biennial (2011); the São Paulo Art Biennial (2012); Prospect New Orleans (2017); the Gothenburg Biennial (2015 and 2021) and the Ural Biennial (2021). In 2019 he was awarded the Friends of Modern Museet Sculpture Prize and was DAAD artist in residence in Berlin.

New York-based artist Landon Metz has garnered critical attention for his ability to imbue a spare language of abstraction with visual dynamism and sense of movement. His paintings have the capacity to expand and deal with space serially, while being site-responsive rather than site-specific. Metz’s painting practice is marked by a great sensitivity to site and scale and increasingly incorporates performance and sculptural approaches to activate the space.
Strategies of display are central to Metz’s visual language and his installations often incorporate elements of rhythm and repetition. Multi-panel paintings are frequently presented in his work as diptychs and triptychs, which he sometimes installs abutting one another, reaching into or wrapping around corners. He also produces shaped canvases that mimic the abstract shapes that appear in his other paintings. As Metz has observed,
“My work is largely about breaking down polarities, and I think that’s apparent in the way I present space. It’s about negotiating between setting and subject, public and private.”

Metz’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions in Norway, Italy, Denmark and Canada. In 2014, he was the artist in residence at the ADN Collection in Bolzano, Italy. In 2018, Metz was the subject of a solo exhibition at Museo Pietro Canonica in Rome. Metz was recently featured in the group exhibition Blue, at The Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, and Greffes, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto at Villa Medici in Rome. Metz was born in Phoenix, Arizona and currently lives and works in New York.