Art Basel Hong Kong

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.

Jacopo Benassi (b. 1970), photographer and artist, lives and works in La Spezia. Over the years, he has developed a personal style in which depth of field is eliminated and the light of the flash becomes a signature, a stylistic limit that he self-imposes to achieve photos that are raw and without any mediation. The subjects photographed are highly disparate ranging from the underground and international music scene – starting from his experience at the B-Tomic club, which he manages with some friends – to portraits of models, actresses, artists, designers published in the most important magazines, as well as investigations of the body, including self-portraits, documentation of sexual encounters, and ancient statuary. Benassi is also occasionally a performer and musician. His experimentation with performance is always linked to music and is mediated by the photographic image, the subject and object of his research. Recent solo shows: Matrice (2022) at Fondazione Carispezia, La Spezia, PAST (2021) at the Francesca Minini Gallery in Milan, Vuoto (2020) at the Pecci Centre in Prato, CRACK (2019) double exhibition at CAMERA – Italian Centre for Photography in Turin and at the European Photography Festival in Reggio Emilia, and Bologna Portraits (2019) at Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna. He has exhibited for FotoGrafia – International Festival of Rome (2009), Vade retro. Art and homosexuality from von Gloeden to Pierre et Gilles (2007) at Palazzina Reale in Florence, Aphotography (2005) at the Changing Role Gallery in Napoli, Artissima (2006-2007) in Turin. He has worked with directors and writers such as Paolo Sorrentino, Daniele Ciprì, Asia Argento, and Maurizio Maggiani, and with creative director Federico Pepe (for COCO, a music and videoart project, and for publications by Le Dictateur). In 2011 he opened Talkinass – Paper and Records and produced magazines and live CDs of artists on the underground scene. An active self-publisher, he has created limited-edition publications and a magazine produced in real time at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He has participated in events such as No Soul for Sale (2010) at the Tate Modern in London, curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni. Recently, he has concentrated on creating performative and photographic displays based on Live Shooting, resulting in the solo show Hunt me down (2021) and collaborations with some protagonists of the Italian performance, visual, and music scene: Lady Maru for Brutal Casual (2020), Kinkaleri for No Title Yet (2017) and ONCE MORE (2020), Sissi for Rollers (2019). In 2009, the 1861 United Agency published The Ecology of Image, a large monograph of Benassi’s works. He also published the photographic books FAGS (NERO, 2020), Dying in Venice (Bruno, 2015), Bologna Portraits (Damiani, 2019), Mis Q Lee (Quinlan, 2018), and Gli aspetti irrilevanti (Mondadori, 2016) with Paolo Sorrentino. He released the LPs ONCE MORE with Kinkaleri (Xing, 2021) and Benassi plays Benassi (2019), a sonic and photographic self-documentation of his body, with remix by Khan of Finland and Jochen Arbeit. He has worked with numerous magazines in Italy and abroad, such as: Rolling Stone, GQ, Wired italia, Wired U.S.A, Riders, 11 Freunde, Crush Fanzine, Dapper Dan, Vice, Almaviva/Le Figaro, Gioia, and Purple.fr.

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.

Daniel Buren has punctuated the past 50 years of art with unforgettable interventions, controversial critical texts, thought-provoking public art projects and engaging collaborations with artists from different generations. Throughout his career Buren has created artworks that complicate the relationship between art and the structures that frame it. In the early 1960s, he developed a radical form of Conceptual Art, a “degree zero of painting” as he called it, which played simultaneously on an economy of means and the relationship between the support and the medium. In 1965 he began using his 8.7cm-wide vertical stripes as the starting point for research into what painting is, how it is presented, and more broadly, the physical and social environment in which an artist works. All of Buren’s interventions are created in situ, borrowing and colouring the spaces in which they are presented. They are critical tools addressing questions of how we look and perceive, and the way space can be used, appropriated, and revealed in its social and physical nature. In his work life finds its way into art, while autonomous art is able to reconnect with life.

Daniel Buren was born in Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris), France in 1938. He lives and works in situ. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions at Museo de Arte Italiano, Lima, Peru (2019); Carriageworks, Redfern, Australia (2018); Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, OH, USA (2018); Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany (2018); Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany (2017); Centre Pompidou Málaga, Málaga, Spain (2017); BOZAR Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2016); Museo – Espacio, Aguascalientes, Mexico (2016); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2014); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2014); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2013); the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (2005) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2002). Buren has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, Italy more than ten times and was awarded the Golden Lion for his French Pavilion in 1986. That same year, he produced his first and most controversial public commission, The Two Plateaux, for the main courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris, France. In 2007, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting from Japan. Most recently, he was selected for the site specific Monumenta 2012 commission at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. Buren’s 1994 installation The Arches, permanent work in situ, is on view at the Southampton City Art Gallery, and in May 2017, he launched another permanent installation in the UK – Diamonds and Circles, works in situ – at Tottenham Court Road station in London, commissioned by Art on the Underground.

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.