Artistas

A highly cultivated and extremely refined painter from a stylistic point of view, Agostino Arrivabene places his paintings in an enchanted and magical atmosphere, rich in references and quotations, ranging from symbolism to surrealism, passing through Renaissance and seventeenth-century painting, using a style pictorially and surprisingly fluid, at times dense, at times rarefied and changeable, which points almost to abstraction. The mythology, the strong link with the culture of Ancient Greece, the sacred, the dark atmospheres in which his timeless characters are immersed, are the visual and cultural references that characterise the artist’s research. Among his collection of quotations we can also find echoes of Bernini’s sculpture, in other cases references to seventeenth-century sacred painting, to the heads of the Arcimboldo or to the still life of the Flemish painters, but the game of references does not exhaust the strength of his painting. Arrivabene’s research moves on an ambiguous terrain, where myth, antiquity and contemporary life come together in a unique dimension, out of time and history.He moves in a visionary universe populated by cosmic underground obsessions. Mysterious characters, landscapes that evoke the scenario of ancient mythological fables of which we cannot find the exact temporal collocation, of mutant beings that seem to come from a mythological tale both ancient and modern, populate his canvases and tables. That dilation of the figures in the shapeless drama of the indistinct, those small, monstrous little animals that infest the body of mortals, those bacterial flowers, those lichens, bacteria, strange coral growths, those fluorescence, both organic and purely mental, highlyand authentically lysergic, are the result of a hallucinated and strongly spiritual vision of reality, as the artist went to look for in not visible details the secret meaning of existence. This attention to the detail has resulted in Arrivabene’s paintings actually embodying a process of alchemical transformation, in which the physical matter of painting itself is transmuted into extraordinary light-filled visions. Investigating eternity, time, the process of change, the rites of transformation, and sacred love and death, Arrivabene utilises symbols and images that are seemingly distant from the contemporary in order to create art that crosses the boundaries of time.

Agostino Arrivabene was born in 1967 in Rivolta d’Adda where he still lives. Among the exhibitions that marked his career, in addition to attending the 54th International Art Exhibition of the 2011 Venice Biennial, we remember Deliri, on the occasion of the 53rd Festival of the two Worlds in Spoleto in 2010, Urania alla Casa del Manzoni in Milan in 2010, Tó Páthei Máthos at the Panorama Museum, Bad Frankenhausen in 2013, Hierogamy ” in New York in 2016, “Anabasis”, Civic Museum of the Capuchins of Bagnacavallo (RV) in 2015, Anastasis at the Mantegna house in Mantua in 2016 and The Parasitic Guest at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lissone in 2017. Many of his works are in museum collections including: the AF Foundation, Frankfurt am Mein (DE), the Chateau du Gruyère Collection, Gruyère (CH), the Achille Bertarelli Collection, Sforza Castle, Milan, Michetti Foundation, Franca Villa al Mare, Cappuccine Museum, Bagnacavallo, Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia. He has also created numerous theatre sets for operas in Italy and in Europe.

Vicky Barranguet is an abstract expressionist artist from Montevideo, Uruguay, living and working in New York City since 1997, where she hosts her studio practice. Her studies with master painters, such as Larry Poons and William Scharf at the The Art Students League of New York in Manhattan, propelled her to find a voice of her own and a colorful expression about life, emotions, and music. Embodied by an empirical investigation of the pictorial structure, processes departing from spontaneous gestures evolving into elaborate and complex systems where improvisation, organization of form and space, and attention to detail are at her work’s core. Her daring works, led to the creation of an open-minded art approach, where she combines painting with other art forms. She was awarded with a Merit Scholarship from the judges and curators of “The Frick Collection” and her work was exhibited at Lincoln Center’s Cork Gallery. Barranguet’s paintings are part of worldwide corporate and private collections and are shown nationally and internationally, including numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, England, France, China, Japan and Uruguay, among others.

Her most recent commissions include:

A site-specificpermanent installation consisting of 150 meters of hand painted canvas for Galleria Vik Milano – Townhouse Galleria Hotel, Milan, Italy. Located on the second floor’s hallway and several suites of the hotel. Drawing inspiration from life, world music, the spontaneity of jazz, the cosmopolitan energy and diversity of New York City, where she works and lives, while honoring and reconnecting to her family’s Italian roots.

An 18’ piece, featured at the Park Avenue PwC’s headquarters, to highlight the drama and attitude of New York City’s vibrant culture.

In 2019 she was also commissioned to create several original pieces for Nordstrom’s headquarters art collection displayed in NYC, Texas and Minneapolis’ Mall of America.

Currently, she is one of the five selected artists working at The High Line Nine Residency in Chelsea, NY. The program celebrates the energy, candor and resiliency of the beautiful city we call home with an uplifting theme: Dare to reimagine. In lieu of packed gallery openings during the COVID-19 pandemic, the residency consists of an engaging and inspiring alternative: the chance to see artists’ creation processes in the very same Chelsea windows that normally display their finished art pieces. Here, the city has the rare opportunity to see five of its talented resident artists at work for an extended period.

Art created during the residency will be exhibited in a show presented at the High Line Nine and produced by Sugarlift later in 2020. Select pieces will be displayed in Related properties, including the Zaha Hadid and Hudson Yards’ buildings.

Matteo Basilé is an artist who knows how best to mix signs and symbols from our most archaic roots using methods, tools and linguistic codes belonging to the most advanced technologies. His work is placed on a bridge that lies between the re-appropriation of digital images that the web constantly throws at us and the ability to continually transform, soil and contaminate in order to turn them into icons of a time that, as it flows, self-regenerates itself through new idols and new fetishes. The artist plays with symbols, signs and the new gods of this confused and chaotic era, reshaping every image through the register of paradox, disguise, transformation and technological play. Always poised between the search for formal perfection and the attraction for the “dark side of beauty,” with effects often bordering on the grotesque, Basilé’s work is characterised in particular by the creation of a totally original and recognisable dimension where reality, myth and dream seem to miraculously end up coinciding. Mysterious and beautiful women, heroes of a time suspended between the remote past and near future, ancient and disturbing warrior women of unknown ethnicity, gods and demigods with disharmonious forms and strange pagan idols, mysterious transgender figures of a baroque era still to come and archaic fighters with fiery weapons are some of the characters taking turns in the different series of the artist’s recent production.

Matteo Basilé was born in Rome in 1974 where he lives. Born from a well-established dynasty of artists (Cascella), Matteo Basilé has been exposed to the art world all his life. Among his latest exhibitions are the solo show Appartions at MART in Trento and Rovereto (2006), collective exhibitions in the Marlborough Gallery in Monaco (2008), Experimentaat the Farnesina Palace in Rome (2008), Italia, 1980-2007 at the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi (2007), APPARITIONS at the MART Museum in Rovereto, Italy (2009), THISHUMANITY at Galleria PACK in Milan (2010), Landing at Galleria Guidi&Schoen in Genoa, Italy (2012), THISHUMANITY at Cultural Italian Institute in Madrid (2012), Matteo Basilé solo exhibition at 53 Art Museum in Guangzhou, China (2013), PIETRA SANTA at Macro Museum in Rome (2016), FALLING OUT OF TIME at theUnited Art Museum in Wuhan, China (2019) and, MIRROR at the Hongkun Museum of Fine Art in Beijing, China (2019).

Sara Baxter works on the difficult relationship between art and mass communication with an explicit reference to Pop Art. Much of her artistic production is linked to the image of consumer objects, transformed into artistic icons with a strong ironic and playful component. Among his most famous works, Baxter has made a three-dimensional review of the typical tomato sauce cans made famous by Andy Warhol, on which the artist has printed the logos of the classic superheroes, from Superman and Batman to Wonder Woman, or images of comic and cartoon characters. Her work aims at eliminating the differences between high culture and low culture along the typical Pop Art line, but also a playful review of the relationship between consumer object, popular culture and artistic object turned into a luxury fetish.In her most recent production, Sara Baxter has immortalised a series of objects and symbols of widespread consumerism, such as bottles of refreshing drinks or spirits, food containers, perfumes, labels of edible products, commercial logos and packaging. She then made them the protagonists of the paintings with a style that mixes pop style with the influence of the advertising illustration.Art, the English artist seems to tell us in her work, is a very serious game in which it is increasingly difficult for the art collector as well as for the consumer, to understand the real value of the work from the surplus value provided by the complex mechanism that regulates the art system, similar to what happens in the commercial system in which the value of the brand and the brand itself has replaced thereal value of the object offered for sale in supermarkets.

An artist of English origin, Sara Baxter has lived and worked in Milan for many years. After working as an artistic director for the fashion industry she has exhibited since 2005 in many collective and personal exhibitions. She was a finalist in important art awards such as the Combat Award. Among the exhibitions in which she participated we recall “Pop Up Revolution” in 2014.

Alessandro Bazan’s painting has always moved with great ease and strong technical ability between irony, vision and great happiness, fluidity of sign and colour. The subjects of his paintings range freely across different stylistic references: from the Sicilian folk tradition and the history of the Twentieth Century Avant-garde to suggestions taken from advertising, comics and cinema. The favourite settings of his paintings are the slums of the city in which his characters move on the stage of a grotesque, violent, comical or happy everyday life, depending on the situation. His characters are situated halfway between dream and fiction within a generational narrative. The artist from Palermo could thus be defined as a “genre painter”, who deliberately mixes references, but who also draws on images taken from genre cinema, such as noir, western, thriller and TV series, as well as from pulp literature and more generally from all of contemporary popular culture. His works are made with great awareness and pictorial joy, which leads the artist to paint one canvas with fluid and delicate tones, another with an almost expressionist mark and another absolutely free and light-hearted, almost touching abstraction.

Alessandro Bazan was born in Palermo in 1966, where he lives and works. He has a rich and articulated exhibition history. Among his major exhibitions:La Sapienza University Laboratory Museum, Grand Palaisin Paris, Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna, PAC in Milan, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the cultural sites of Zisa, Belmonte RisoMuseum in Palermo, Promotriceof Fine Arts in Turin, Palazzo della Pennain Perugia, and the National Museum of Villa Guinigiin Lucca. Among the institutions that have hosted his works are the Rome Quadriennial of Art and the Venice Biennial.

Matteo Bergamasco describes scenes of everyday and ordinary domestic intimacy, crossed by an atmosphere of subtle restlessness and distressing existential disorientation, in a journey made of images, illusions, and coloured sensations. His often dark and mysterious interiors, furrowed by dark shadows and disturbing presences, welcome the viewer on a journey of memories and perceptions. They appear as the mirror of a society that seeks its new ethical and social balance within the walls of the home, without ever being able to truly find it. At other times, mysterious buildings, such as “The Amino Acid Factory”, stand out in an almost fairy-tale landscape, inviting the viewer to enter in a “different” reality, a parallel world where the rules of science and rationality have been abolished. Matteo Bergamasco’s painting takes references from symbolist painting, from pointillism to neo-expressionism. He represents the styles of the past in a contemporary key that starts from a clearly post-modernist perspective, trying to elaborate a new dimension of doing strongly conceptual paintings. He abandons the schemes and references to the history of art of the past to find a new spiritual dimension. The artist describes his works as “traces, diaries”, “accounts of something that happened in the past”. At other times they are instead “journeys a bit magical in the expectation of the present”.

Matteo Bergamasco was born in Milan in 1982, where he lives and works. His painting has attracted the attentionof critics since he was still a student at the Brera Academy in Milan. In the early 2000s, Bergamasco won the Cairo Award and participated at the Italian Factory exhibition -The New Italian Art Scene at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Turin and Venice. He was then invited to participate in numerous exhibitions dedicated to new Italian and European painting, from Palazzo Reale in Milan to the Venice Biennial. There are also numerous exhibitions abroad: from Amsterdam to Cologne to Los Angeles.

Photographer & Visualteller What you see, is who you are -says Szymon Brodziak, the master of black and white photography. The youngest aritist exhibited at the Museum of Photography –Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin (2015). The best black & white campaign photographer of the world, acclaimed by the jury of Fashion TV Photographers Awards, during 2013 Cannes Film Festival. In 2019, Brodziak confrmed his mastery by winning 1st Place in World’s Top 10 Black&White Photographers contest curated by OneEyeland.

He loves to photograph women. He’s inspired mainly by locations, where he brings to life his monochromatic visions. Brodziak received Johnnie Walker Keep Walking Award for constant fulfilment of dreams and passion for setting new paths in the search of beauty.

In Europe, Brodziak received plenty of medals and honourable mentions in numerous editions of the renowed Prix de la Photographie Paris, both for commercial and personal projects, including the title of Advertising Photographer of the Year (2016). In the USA, he won frst place in Fashion category in two photo competitions: International Photography Awards (2016) and Black and White Spider Awards (2016), which rewards the best monochromatic images from all over the word. His frst photo album ONE had its official premiere in Rome (2014). It presents the first 10 years of his professional activity. The publication starts with a personal dedication from June Newton, wife to the legendary photographer Helmut Newton. Szymon’s new photographic album entitled What you see is who you are won a Gold Medal (Book: Cover) and 2 Bronze Medals (Book: Fine Art & Other) at Prix de la Photographie Paris 2019 and also, Honorable Mention at 2019 International Photography Awards in the USA.

The artist’s work can be seen and ordered in his own galleries of photography located in Poland and are also available worldwide at Online Shop: www.szymonbrodziak.com.

Alessandro Busci works with different and heterogeneous materials: from corten steel to copper to aluminum worked with acids and glazes, to silk, paper, up to classic canvas. The artist investigates the potential of the exchange between western and eastern iconographic traditions, thanks to a strong and decisive mark, which at times reminds us of oriental calligraphyand which often changes and transforms in contact with metallic supports. The rust, generated by the acid on the metal, becomes pigment, and the chemical reactions between enamels and steel become the pretext for an alchemical game of transformations of colour and pictorial matter. The themes chosen for Galleria Vik Milano – Townhouse Galleria are those typical of his pictorial production: on the one hand, nature, so dear to the artist: birch forests and trees painted with the unmistakable contrasts of light, on the other, the means of the journey, the aeroplane. As a backdrop the city of Milan and its constantly changing architectures and above all a living sky, changeable, dramatic and romantic in its instability. Alessandro Busci, painter and architect, was born in Milan in 1971, where he lives and works. His personal exhibitions have been staged in Milan, Rome, Brescia, Turin, London, Bordeaux, Madrid, Bilbao, San Francisco and Naples. Since 1997 he has collaborated with Atelier Mendini contributing to the realization of various architecture, decoration and exhibition projects. In 2010, on the occasion of the China Trade Award, Busci and Cathay Pacific will present the Airports volume at the Triennale of Milan, and in the same year the artist was invited to the Venice Biennial in the Italian and Cuban Pavilions. In 2014 his personal exhibition at the Triennale of Milan. In 2017 another personal exhibition at the Soglia Magica, in terminal 1 of Milan Malpensa. Among the museums and public institutions that have hosted his works there is the Rome Quadrennial, Palazzo Reale in Milan and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan.

Born in Montevideo in 1965. Graduated from the National School of Fine Arts. He studied engraving with Luis Camnitzer in Italy. Study architecture.

He has solo exhibitions at Galería Sur, the National Museum of Visual Arts in Montevideo, the Juan Manuel Blanes Museum, the Municipal Subway, Artfulliving (Washington DC), Galería Laca (Charlotte, NC), Wertingen City Hall (Germany). He participates in the Cuenca Biennial, the Mercosur Biennial, the “Do ut do” Biennial (Pompeii, Italy). With Galería Sur, he participates in the international fairs of Arteaméricas, Miami. Cornice Art Fair, Venice. ARCO Fair, Madrid, Arteba, Buenos Aires, SP art, San Pablo.

He has won, among others, the first prize of the National Hall of Visual Arts, the first Bicentennial prize of the National Museum, the Paul Cèzanne prize of the French Embassy, the first prize of the Municipal Hall of Montevideo.

His works are in important collections in America and Europe. He has installations at Estancia Vik, José Ignacio, “Casa Tierra” in Bahía Vik, murals in Playa Vik, murals in the tasting room and in the barrel room in Viña Vik, Vik Chile and at the Galleria Vik Milano – Townhouse Galleria , Italy.

Tommaso Cascella uses the most archaic means that man is able to use: paper, wood, iron, earth and natural pigments. Through an elegant blending of materials and colours, his painting tends to express a three-dimensional relief as a voice with his bronze sculptures. Charged with universal meanings, the intense chromatic compositions of Cascella represent architectural layouts that are balanced through the symbolic signs of an alchemic alphabet. His work is extraordinarily dense and profound, from the richness and complexity of the reading plans of his work and the continuous references to the history of the avant-gardes, to ancient and primitive art, to literature and poetry, and even anthropology and philosophy. Its strength is to have created a highly expressive and absolutely original language, made up of immediate signs and the use of simple materials. His paintings are often monochromatic, rich in essential primitive signs, which cross the surface, to which are added elements jutting out in wood and iron that form a sort of visual framework for the painting.

Cascella tirelessly plays with strange signs of an imaginary alphabet, creating symbols with mysterious meanings, slipping between different materials and with different techniques and with great freedom and expressive strength.

His abstract signs, significant in their primitive elementary nature, are at the same time the sign of the rejection of our current language and the creation of another language, at once poetic and symbolic, archaic, imaginative and mysterious.

Tommaso Cascella was born in Rome in 1951, he lives in Rome and Bomarzo, near Viterbo. Painting and sculpture are natural languages for him, due to his familiar artistic background. Since 1984 Tommaso Cascella has participated in more than 200 group and solo exhibitions all over the world.

Among other places, he has participated in the Venice Biennial and the Rome Quadrennial. Since 1995 he has been named “Academic for sculpture” at the San Luca Academy. His works are installed in squares and public places, such as the Tachikawa City district of Tokyo, in important public museums such as the National Museum of Slovenia in Ljubljana, the MACRO in Rome, the Pinacoteca of the Council of State in Rome, the Wuhan Art Museum, in China. His exhibitions have been hosted in public spaces, museums and galleries all over the world, in Switzerland, Germany, Slovakia, Japan, China and Taiwan, as well as in numerous museums and public institutions in Italy.

Patrizia Dalla Valle is a mosaic artist and sculptress. Her training is based on the study of the great Byzantine and Ravenna mosaic tradition, as well as the languages of the historical avant-garde and the most recent developments of the new art scene. This is the origin of the production that has made her famous, which combines traditional mosaic technique in a unique language with forms, suggestions and supports that are linked to the most experimental practices of the contemporary scene.

In the artist’s poetic mosaic becomes a pure, autonomous language, capable of
reinventing completely new and original forms and suggestions, while keeping an eye on the great ancient tradition. Thus, in Patrizia Dalla Valle’s sculptures, concave and convex forms appear, often covered with golden mosaic, recalling the apses and columns of ancient cathedrals. As well as certain effects of lines and colours recall the decorativeness of fourteenth-century painting, and her monumental golden thrones, with their ogival-shaped backs, also recall the atmosphere of the Gothic period. At other times, Patrizia Dalla Valle’s mosaics seem to evoke the movement and formal variety of the universe.
However, although his compositions often trace themes and suggestions taken from
antiquity, they never fall into the mere re-proposal of archaic techniques. Memory, as well as the quote of subjects and themes taken from the history of art and archaeology, are actually integral parts of the artist’s work, all centred on strongly contemporary themes and atmospheres: elements, therefore, which only apparently seem to contradict each other, but showing deeply a research of great historical rigour, great courage and formal novelty.

Patrizia Dalla Valle was born in Budrio (BO) and lives in Prada di Russi (RA). After graduating in scientific disciplines, her interest for art disciplines began and turned her constant research and experimentation. After an initial propensity for ceramic technique she then moved on to mosaic, privileging its language and rereading its history. Numerous and prestigious are the personal and collective exhibitions organized in Italy and abroad, supported by important critical partecipations. The artist has already been a guest in important public and private spaces, in particular, Matera-Complex San Nicola dei Greci, Church of the Madonna delle Virtù in Sasso Barisano (2008), Venice – Galleria La Fenice Art Space (2015), Rome, Villa Torlonia Museums, Casina delle Civette (2016). More recently, the artist has exhibited her works at the Pavilion of the Syrian Arab Republic during the 57th Venice Biennale; at the National Archaeological Museum of Venice; at the
Scuderie di Palazzo Ortolani in Voltana (Ravenna).

Born in Young, Uruguay in 1972, lived in Paris and Berlin between 2000 and 2012, currently lives and works in Montevideo. Her artistic practice is linked to the loss of frames of reference, uncertainty and alienation, through painting and painting in space. Her exhibitions include: BienalSur 2019 at the Center for Art and Nature, Muntref in Buenos Aires, the 2nd Montevideo Biennial “500 years of the future” 2014. “NOVUS” at the Contemporary Art Space and “Sharing the Beauty” at the China Millennium Monument Museum in Beijing 2017. “No Place” at the Heart Tower, NYC 2014. “No Place”, at the National Museum of Visual Arts, Montevideo 2013. “Horizon” at the Ministry of Education and Culture of Montevideo ( MEC) 2008. the Second Biennial of Mercosur in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1999. She received awards in Uruguay and abroad, some of them are: National Hall of Visual Arts Award “Linda Kohen” in 2018 in Uruguay, “Premio Salon Montrouge” in 2005 in France. “Paul Cezzanne” Award in 2000 in Uruguay. “Mercosur International Art Award-BA” in Buenos Aires in 2000.

Sara Forte was born in 1978 in Verbania, Italy. A self-taught artist who since an early age has beendedicated to painting. Sara experimented with many art forms including graphite drawings, oil pastels,sanguine, drypoint, mezzotint and etching. She went onto master oil and acrylic art forms. What wasoriginally a passion has become her career. The key elements in her work are the balance between shapesand colors, pictorial tradition and innovation. The style of her artwork has evolved into an abstract andsymbolic “new wave”, as a metaphor of the constant “in fieri”, of the ceaseless evolution of mankind. Fora number of years she has been using the most famous of the Murano’s furnaces to create her unique glasssculptures depicted in her paintings. The glass sculptures acquire an allegorical value, with references tothe works of the best known writers of the 20th Century. In her most recent artworks silicon discs havereplaced canvas, using them as a conceptual element to represent the evolution of communication.Silicon, the material used today to produce tablets, smartphones and computers, will be the object of thefuture archeology. This versatile experimental artist is currently exhibiting her works in Italy and abroad.Sara Forte has exhibited in Italy, Austria and France. She lives and works in Milan.

Marcelo Legrand was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1961. Between 1977 and 1982, he studied with Héctor Sgarbi at the Circle of Fine Arts in Montevideo. In 1986, he studied engraving with David Finkbeiner from the University of New York at the Purchase College. He studied the art of making paper with Laurence Barker (Head of Barcelona Paper Horlkshep), at the Museum of Plastic and Visual Arts, in Montevideo. Luis Camnitzer gave him a scholarship to study engraving on metal in Lucca, Italy.

Main Individual Exhibitions:

2003: Foundation for the Arts, Washington DC, USA. Eklekticos Gallery, Washington DC, USA. 2001: Art Museum of the Americas Gallery, Washington DC, USA. 1993: Astrid Paredes Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela. 1988: Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Montevideo, Uruguay. Main Collective Exhibitions: 2008: Arco, Madrid, Spain. South Gallery, Punta Del Este, Uruguay. 2007: Art Ba, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Art Miami, 07, USA. SP 07, San Pablo, Brazil. Cornice, Venice, Italy. South Gallery, Punta del Este, Uruguay. 2006: South Gallery, Punta del Este, Uruguay. 2004: Graphics from Mercosur, Granada, Spain. 2002: Borges Cultural Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2002: Museum of the Americas, Puerto Rico. Museum Corcoran, Washington DC, USA. International Salon Château de Beauregard and Spirale Center, Château D’ Anctoville, Normandy, France. XI Iberoamerican Art Biennial, DF, Mexico. 1992: Sofía Imber Museum of Contemporary Art, Caracas, Venezuela.

Main Awards: 2000: Batuz Foundation, First Prize. 1999: “Mosca S.A.” Young Art Biennial, First Prize. 1998: VII Salto Biennial, First Prize. 1988: Municipal Salon of Plastic Expression, XXXVI Award; Montevideo, Uruguay. 1987: New Talent Award, Drawing, AICA, Selection 85-87, Montevideo, Uruguay. Oriental Band Award, First Prize, Fray Bentos, Uruguay. 70th Anniversary, Israeli Community from Uruguay, Second Prize

Willow is a Milanese street artist who has combined for many years street work with graphic and pictorial experimentation in a highly pop style, which has earned him a prominent place in the panorama of the new Italian art. The media on which he carries out his experiments range from the classic painting on canvas, to the decoration of objects, clothes, cars, motorbikes, furnishings and fittings.

Willow represents a neo-pop culture inherited from the American tradition, but reworked in a very personal way, his suggestions come from of Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Basquiat works, intensified by the stylistic features of street art and the expressive code of comics,. Born as an illustrator and cartoonist, the artist has developed his own language, with a narrative flavour, capable of telling stories in a balance between irony and hilarity. Each canvas features curious and captivating characters, suspended in an undefined space and intent on an onomatopoeic dialogue, typical of comics, which surprises and amuses the viewer. Willow’s world is surreal and like fairytale, an essential escape from which the viewer cannot escape, but at the same time figurative art embraces the lines of design, the provocation of advertising, the challenge of collaborations with companies and famous brands, because creation is a process in the making, free and stimulating. “Pop is popular”, says the artist, “it is having fun connecting on various levels and show to as many people as possible your way of being there, of living the art of having fun playing with communication. Pop is colour and expressiveness”.

Filippo Bruno aka Willow was born in Milan in 1978. After graduating from the School of Comics and Illustration, he turned to street art, but his career soon included exhibitions in private galleries and public museums, collaborations with publishing houses, advertising agencies and design companies. His collaborations with companies include those with Borsalino presented at Pitti Uomo, the Luca Boffi sofa exhibited at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, a special edition of the famous COMIX diary in 2014 and advertising work for Motta, such as the personalisation of a Milanese tram and the limited edition packaging of the famous panettone. He is considered one of the leading artists of Italian Pop Art. From Milan to Miami, from Montreal to Sydney: eighteen are the galleries around the world that host Willow’s works, and more than twenty exhibitions have been organised in the last three years carrying on the name of Pop Art Made in Italy through Willow’s works.