Art Basel Miami Beach

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.

Francesco Simeti (b. 1968, Palermo, Italy) is an artist known for his site-specific installations, which aesthetically present enchanting scenes that reveal a more complex subtext upon closer inspection. His work often appropriates photographs from newspapers and magazines to raise questions about the role of images in contemporary discourse.
Public Art is a fundamental aspect of his practice, he has worked with Percent for Art and Public Art for Public Schools in NYC, the Multnomah county in Oregon and has created permanent additions to subway stations in Brooklyn and Chicago.

He has had solo exhibitions at venues such as Assembly Room, New York, (2019); Open Source Gallery, New York (2017); Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palermo (2012); and Artists Space, New York (2009). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Museo Civico di Castelbuono, Palermo (2019); ICA Singapore (2017); Palazzo Reale, Milan (2016); and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin (2014). He has also exhibited work at the Triennale di Milano (2014 and 2013). Simeti lives and works in New York. He works with the gallery Francesca Minini in Italy.
He is currently a resident at ISCP – International Studio & Curatorial Studies, New York.