Atelier Aperti/Work In Progress

Dal venerdì 09 dicembre 2005
al martedì 20 dicembre 2005

The Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice presents a selection of 10 artists at Fondaco Marcello, the new exhibition venue for contemporary art inaugurated in June 2005: a high visibility location revealing the quality of the ongoing artistic researches to an outstanding public. The show opens at the same time as “Where Art Worlds Meet: Multiple Modernities and the Global Salon”, the international Symposium organised by the Biennale di Venezia, which will see arts critics, curators, museum managers and experts in arts economy from all over the world meet for four days, between 9 and 12 December 2005, at Palazzo Franchetti.

“10 artists at Fondaco Marcello”, an exhibition conceived and curated by Gloria Vallese and Paolo De Grandis, is organised in association with the Biennale di Venezia. It is the follow-up to Atelier Aperti and Controluce, side events and part of the 51. International Art Exhibition which, during the summer of 2005, showed to an esteemed public of four thousand visitors the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice as a workshop engaged in the production of a broad spectrum of contemporary art, from traditional techniques to new technologies. All the ten artists of Fondaco Marcello come from Atelier Aperti and were chosen among those who, although around or under thirty years of age, are at the beginning of promising careers, already with a considerable amount of exhibitions and prizes to their credit. Each of them, albeit with a necessarily limited selection of works, presents an original production, yet in full harmony with the current picture of international artistic researches, in the fields of painting, sculpture, photography, staging, or of new digital technologies. As if to say that Venice, and Italy as a whole, do not need to go abroad, as they all too often do, to find new and high-quality artists: perhaps they already have them back home, but they neglect them, or ignore this…
From this perspective, the coincidence of this show with the international Symposium organised by the Biennale di Venezia is not casual: quite the opposite, after the promising initial cooperation marked by the activities related to the 51.International Art Exhibition, this is a significant sign of willingness to continue the dialogue, implementing the local and permanent activities which have been in the air for a long time, and which should restore Venice as an active hub, not only an exhibition venue, for current art.




To promote the new initiative, the Accademia availed itself of the support of Arte Communications, the Venetian culture company headed by Paolo De Grandis and of Contemporanea, a Veronese advertising and events promotion agency managed by Massimo Anselmi.

Fondaco Marcello is a new, charming venue for contemporary art in Venice: it is a 16th-17th century warehouse on the Canal Grande, a picturesque brick construction with stone columns supporting monumental wood trusses, a 400 m3 example of functional architecture reminiscent of the interior of the Arsenale’s Corderie, in its typology. After being refurbished and adapted to host contemporary art events, it was opened in June 2005 during the 51st International Art Exhibition with the collateral participation of Hong Kong, curated by Paolo De Grandis.



THE ARTISTS:

Martin Emilian Balint presents Alfred’s Fetish, a spectacular and baroque installation with its two thousand origami paper birds, already exhibited at the Museum in Constanta (Romania) in 2001, and two sets of recent photographs reporting ironic, paradoxical body art experiments.
Primož Bizjak, a photograph of urban landscapes , presents the Sarajevo triptych, a moving sequence of night images from the war-scarred town, and one of his peculiar images of a Venice eternally decomposing-recomposing itself, taken by night from canal cleaning yards;
Alessio Bogani paints figures over large-size landscapes in oils and acrylic, vulnerable nudes on shabby backgrounds, vaguely evocative of prison camps or borderlands;
Vania Comoretti is linking her name, at an international level, with sequences of portraits which may look like identity photos, while in fact they are created, with stunning mastery, in pastel and watercolour;
Resi Girardello interprets sculpture with subtle irony: iron wire, copper wire, metal sheets make up improbable animals, or are patiently woven to assemble clothes not to be worn;
Jaša Mrevlje translates into large-size painting illustrations from children’s books, that coloured and joyous world of fables and amusement parks, mysteriously prone to turn into a nightmare;
Elisa Rossi linked her painting debut to images of teenagers at home, caught in the seeming quiet of gentle moments: dressing, washing, talking on the telephone;
Barbara Taboni uses the cast to give shape to a peculiar installation, based on the human foot;
Cristina Treppo has explored for a long time the feeble, ambiguous boundary between organic and inorganic in the photographs and installations making up the Natural/Artificial series;
Dania Zanotto creates monumental sculpture-dresses, several metres wide, whose materials range from gauzes, through feathers to iron meshes.




Inauguration: 9 December 2005 from 6.30 to 9.00 p.m.


Opening: 10 - 20 DECEMBER 2005, opening hours 10 a.m. - 6.00 p.m.
Venue: Fondaco Marcello, San Marco 3415, Venice
Public Transport: line 1, Sant'Angelo stop and line 1/82, San Tomà stop + "gondola" service
Curated by: Gloria Vallese and Paolo De Grandis
Organisation: Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia
In association with: La Biennale di Venezia
Co- organisation and Press Office: Arte Communications
Promotion: Contemporanea
Patronages: Regione del Veneto, Provincia di Venezia, Comune di Venezia
Catalogue: ATELIER APERTI/WORK IN PROGRESS - 10 artists at Fondaco Marcello, curated
by the experimental course on New Technologies for the Arts of the Accademia di Belle Arti in
Venice, November 2005.


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