Artissima

Armin Boehm was born 1972 in Aachen. He lives and works in Berlin (D).
Armin Boehm paints fictitious and spatially impossible scenes, based on urban layouts and architectural constructions, that are meant to evoke the inner human condition.
In an interview by Gaston La-Gaffe on FAD Magazine, the artist said “The painted surface is as vulnerable as our skin and looking at it is reaching our emotional system very directly”. Due to his tough personal path he is attracted by the painted surface, which is able to deal with the unconsciousness and emotions of the human being.
The images, which sometimes appear to be aerial views or perpetually receding landscapes, explore the idea of natural and manmade borders in geographic surfaces.
His most famous works are large-scale paintings, constructed using complex combinations of materials including fabric, oil paint, pure pigment, metal, and sand.
A majority of Boehm’s paintings have dark palettes and depict nocturnal views with small sources of light; in preparation for exhibiting his paintings, Boehm has been known to paint the walls gray and dim the lights to deepen the experience of darkness. Other subjects have included interiors, smashed trees, bucolic scenes, and car wrecks.
He received a series of Awards in 1998, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (D) and in 2001, Cité des Arts, Paris (F).

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.

Simon Dybbroe Møller’s practice tests the relationship between essential sensate qualities and the evolution of communication; how it feels to be bodies tumbling or stumbling through this world; how we change media and how media changes us. His work often concerns the materiality and physicality of things against the backdrop of ubiquitous representations in the media.
He has had solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Fondazione Giuliani in Rome, Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, 21er Haus in Vienna, Kunstverein Hannover, Frankfurter Kunstverein, among others. His work was included in the 5th Moscow Biennial, the 2nd Turin Triennial, and the 9th Berlin Biennial and in group exhibitions at MOCA Detroit; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; SMK National Gallery, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou, Paris;  CCA Wattis in San Francisco, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Ludwig Museum Köln, MMK Frankfurt am Main and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Dybbroe Møller has been an invited lecturer and guest teacher at Harvard University, UDK Berlin, Kunstakademie München and  École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.
Simon Dybbroe Møller (1976) was born in Aarhus.
He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.

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.

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.

Mandla Reuter was born in 1975, Nqutu (South Africa), and he lives and works in Berlin (Germany). As a sculptor and installation artist, he explores the ambiguous relationship between art and the notion of ‘place’. The constant focus of Mandla Reuter’s research is the exploration of internal and external space. His interventions, which are subtle but at times also radical, call into question typical artistic notions such as ‘art production’ and ‘presentation context’. Reuter often bases his work on the specific characteristics of the space in which he is exhibiting. Poetic, ironic and surreal, Mandla Reuter is an artist who disrupts the language of the ‘system’ of art. He sometimes appears to entirely detach this from the real world, evoking an alienating atmosphere in which fiction proliferates. Reuter takes local narratives to return them to the world as universal events, metaphors of the contradictions that have always distinguished contemporary man. Iquitos, Buenos Aires, the island of Thasos, Los Angeles – where the artist owns a plot of land purchased for an exhibition (A Plot, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, 2010) – are some of the places that the artist has traced in his personal geography, the routes that led him to come across mythical tales or paradoxical stories.

A selection of his Solo Exhibitions: Neompalta, Friends of S.M.A.K, Ghent, 2018; Papananamama, Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva, 2018; Wasser, Schindler House, MAK Center, Los Angeles, 2017, Leland Fitzpatrick House, Los Angeles, 2017; Francesca Minini, Milano, 2017; Croy Nielsen, Vienna, 2017; Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, 2017; Mandla Reuter, Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, 2016; Atlantis in collaboration with Neue Alte Brücke, On Site – Petit Palais, Paris, 2016; #08 Mandla Reuter, Mezzaterra11, Flat Gallery, Belluno.

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.