Artissima

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.

Ambra Castagnetti was born in 1993 in Genova and she now lives and works in Milan.
She is a visual artist that works with sculpture, video, and installation.
After the bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, she graduated in Visual Arts at NABA (Milan) with a short film curated by Adrian Paci.

“Through different mediums such as sculpture, painting, installation, and video, Ambra Castagnetti explores the complex relations between the body and physical and political environment, through a political glance never lacking an implicit dimension of criticism. The evocative power of the images helps to penetrate the complex relation between poetic and political, between reality and fiction, creating a fluid imaginary. The attraction for the body always comes with a wider attraction for the living, where the animal, the mountain, water, desert, earth and sky are called to participate in a unitary narration full of intimacy” (Adrian Paci).

In her work, Castagnetti attempts to dispel and release the feelings of disquiet that arise from dealing with everyday life. Focused on natural, feminine, and animal forms, the artist redraws her feelings towards reality: the body and the mind, and the relationship between the two, become central elements. Ceramic and metal shield a soft, fragile material that would otherwise be destined to dissipate and is unrecognizable in their reflection.

Selected recent shows and projects: Palazzo Braschi, Roma (2023), Fondazione Pini, Milano (2023), New Galerie, Paris (2023), Francesca Minini, Milano (2022), La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia (2022), Manifattura Tabacchi, Firenze (2021), Eastcontemporary, Entrevaux (2021), Palazzo Monti, Brescia (2021), Mana Contemporary, New York (2020), Art Drive In, Brescia (2020), Casa Testori, Milano (2019), Villa Necchi, Milano (2019).  In 2020 she joined the residency programmes in Palazzo Monti, Brescia and Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Born in 1971 in Istanbul, Turkey, Ali Kazma is a lens-based media artist living and working in Istanbul and Paris.

He represented Turkey at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and had a comprehensive solo exhibition at Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2017. Ali Kazma’s other solo exhibitions include Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2023), Albergo Diurno Venezia (Milan, 2018), MUNTREF (Buenos Aires, 2018), Arter (Istanbul, 2015), CAPRI (Düsseldorf, 2015), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, 2010) and Platform Garanti (Istanbul, 2004).

Group exhibitions and biennials include 6th Kuandu Biennale (Taipei, 2018), 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2017), MAXXI (Rome, 2016), Musée d’Art Contemporaine de Lyon (Lyon, 2013), 30th Sao Paulo Biennial (Sao Paulo, 2012), Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul, 2001, 2007, 2011) Muzeum Sztuki Lodz (Lodz, 2012), Istanbul Modern (Istanbul, 2011), Museum Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf, 2010) and New Museum (New York, 2010). He has received the UNESCO Prize for Promotion of the Arts in 2001 and the Nam June Paik Award in 2010. The artist’s works have been included in a number of institutional collections such as CNAP (Paris), Istanbul Modern, MEP (Paris), MONA (Tasmania), Sztuki Museum (Lodz), Tate Modern (London), TBA21 (Vienna), Foundation Louis Vuitton Collection (Paris) and VKV Foundation Collection (Istanbul).

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.