FIAC

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.

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).

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.

Yona Friedman was born in Budapest in 1923, and he passed away in 2020.
The artist studied at the Technical University in Budapest, before continuing his training from 1945 to 1948 at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, where he worked as an architect until 1957. In 1953-54, he met Konrad Wachsmann, whose studies on prefabrication techniques and three-dimensional structures had a considerable influence on him. In 1954, together with some inhabitants of Haifa, Friedman embarked upon an initial experiment involving housing designed by the occupant, but this project never reached completion. In 1956, at the 10th International Congress of Modern Architecture (ICMA) in Dubrovnik, modernism was called into question by his universalist approach and his belief in progress. At the Congress, when people were taking “mobile architecture “to mean the mobility of the dwelling” the “mobile home“ for example” Friedman exhibited for the first time the principles of an architecture encompassing the on-going changes required to provide “social mobility”, based on dwellings and town-planning provisions that could be composed and re-composed, depending on the intentions of the occupants and residents. The Dubrovnik debate gave rise to several think-tanks within the International Congresses, as well as beyond them. Thus it was that in December 1958, Friedman founded the Mobile Architecture Study Group (MASG) which, up until 1962, would focus on the adaptation of architecture to the changes occurring in modern life. He was joined by Kühne, Otto, Ruhnau, Hansen, Frieden and, after 1960, Schulze-Fielitz and Maymont.
He received many awards along his carrier, in 1967 Grand Prix de Recherche et Formes de Demain, Paris, FR, in 1972 Architecture Award of the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, DE and in 1976 he was dressed up as Honorary member of the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten,Amsterdam, NL

His works are in various PUBLIC COLLECTIONS, United States, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York City, NY, Poland, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, France, Musée d’Art Contemporain Lyon, Lyon and Italy, MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome.

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.