Artissima

Jan De Cock was born in 1976 in Etterbeek. He now lives and works in Anderlecht, Belgium.
From the beginning of his career, De Cock’s art has revolved around production and the ways in which an artist relates to the broad culturally-injected concept of Modernism.
In 2003 Jan De Cock entered the competition Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge (Prize for Young Belgian Painters). After Luc Tuymans, he is the second Belgian artist to have had a solo exposition at Tate Modern and the first living Belgian artist to have had an exhibition at MoMA (2008). Much of his work draws on visual and formal comparisons between early-20th century abstract art movements and contemporary design and mass production. During the first decade of his career the artist worked on the intersection between sculpture and architecture and he succeeded in extending the underlying functionalist consequences of the Russian Modernist artist El Lissitzky‘s Proun Room, thus completing a missing link within the modernist program yet to be completed in late twentieth century modernist art.
Since the second decade of the 21st century his works evolves around the concept of Romanticism.
On several occasions, he stresses the independence from market controlled mechanisms which are in an outspoken opposition to a romantic and utopian stand. e.g. the integration of an already existing school in the artist’s studio: The Brussels Art Institute.
From his exhibition Eine Romantische Ausstellung onward the focus of his works shifts towards disruptive interventions in order to destabilise art market mechanisms.
After the departure from Brussels and the relocation of Jan De Cock’s studio to Turin , Italy and then Bruges, Belgium and the closure of The Brussels Art_ Institute, The Bruges Art_ Institute was founded in 2019. Just like its predecessor The Brussels Art_ Institute, The Bruges Art_ Institute is invariably labeled a ‘romantic place’ (quote) by its founder Jan Frederik De Cock. The Bruges Art Institute is home to The Flemish Masters, Grandiose Shipyards and Jan De Cock Advisory. It is a complex of fine arts salons, a studio, a school where the various functions of living, working, studying are united in an anti-modernist way with a Wunderkammer, a showroom and a school.

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.

Alice Ronchi was born in 1989, Ponte dell’Olio.
She grained her BA at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), Milan, IT (2012) and her MA at the departement of Material utopias at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, NL (2015).
She attendend a Residency VSC / Vermont Studio Center, Vermont (USA) in 2017.
In Alice Ronchi’s sculptures and installations, everyday objects meet the world of invention and fantasy. The search for “wonder” is a constant theme in the art of Alice Ronchi, populated by familiar yet enigmatic figures, product of the re-elaboration in an abstract key of everyday objects. Halfway between playful and minimalist, Alice Ronchi’s work is always a perfect synthesis of formal simplicity and geometrical precision. Through the use of different media, ranging from sculpture to photography, from performance to video, Alice Ronchi questions the world with a curious gaze and returns it to us as if it were a magic place, with the ability that artists have always had of looking at the world with different eyes.

She exhibited at Gasconade space, Milan, Peep-Hole, Milan (both 2013); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; La Triennale Museum, Milano (both 2014), Galleria civica di Trento, Trento, Fons Welters Gallery, Amsterdam (both 2015); Macro Museum, Rome and Stadgalerie, Kiel (both 2016), MamBo, Bologna (2018), MAXXI, Rome (2019), GAM, Turin (2020).
Currently she is teaching at NABA University in Milan: Sculpture – International English course.

Becky Beasley (b. 1975, UK) graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 1999 and from The Royal College of Art in 2002, is an artist who lives and works in Hastings, England.
Beasley’s “sculptures and photographs, as mute and minimal as they appear, unexpectedly open onto literary worlds.”(Christy Lange, Frieze Focus).
Beasley produces objects, photographs and texts which are typically informed by a deep engagement with literature — specifically in the past ten years certain writings of William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Bernard Malamud and Thomas Bernhard— and historical research.
She is interested in the ethics of dialogue and how to inhabit the spaces, works and lives of others in tandem with ones own through art.
Her practice is also concerned with spatial experience, in particularly the interior. She has developed a practice which explores the image and the limits of language. Through an abstracted grammar of the everyday, she sources personal experiences and literary references for moments of complexity and ambiguity.
Beasley’s work has been featured in solo exhibition internationally including, Tate Britain, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (live work), Spike Island, Leeds City Art Gallery, Towner Art Gallery, 80WSE (Steinhardt, NYU) New York, South London Gallery (live work) and SKUC Gallery, Ljubljana. Group exhibition participation includes Bluecoat, Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunstverein Munich and La Carte D’Après Nature, National Museums Monaco (Touring to Matthew Marks, New York), as well as three Arts Council Collection touring exhibitions, In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy, curated by Elizabeth Price; British Art Show 7: In The Days of the Comet and Structure and Material (with Claire Barclay and Karla Black).
Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Art Monthly, Frieze, Art Review and Flash Art International. Beasley was on the ICA Artist’s Advisory Committee in 2012 and was nominated for the Max Mara Prize in 2009. She has had five Paul Hamlyn Nominations.

Riccardo Previdi studied Architecture at the Politecnico in Milan as well as Visual Arts at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. These two different studies led him to an interest in the relationship between art and project.
His artistic research questions the possibilities and limits of technological and scientific thought, exposing the complex mechanisms that lie behind the objects and images that surround us in everyday life. By recording, sometimes amplifying, the images produced in excess by our society, the work of Riccardo Previdi wants to raise questions in the viewer about the promises of progress and social redemption made by modernity.

His work was presented in different international group and solo shows such as at Museion Bolzano 2018; PAC Milan 2015; at Castello di Rivoli and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino 2011; at MARTa Herford; Kunstverein Bielefeld 2008. Further he participated to the Moskow Bienial, Manifesta 7, and T1 Torino Triennale. Solo Shows at Galleria Francesca Minini, Milan 2022; Quartz Studio, Torino, 2018; Villa Croce, Genua, 2017; Kunstverein Arnsberg, 2011. Riccardo Previdi lives in Zurich, works in Zürich and Milan.