Galleria VIK Milano

Agostino Arrivabene – Room 214

A highly cultivated and extremely refined painter from s 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 Barranquet – Rooms 209, 215 & Corridor

Vicky Barranguetis 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 TheArt 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 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 shewas 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 Basile – Room 310

Matteo Basiléis 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 artistplays 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 – Room 311

Sara Baxter works on the difficult relationship between art and mass communicationwith 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-dimensionalreview 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 thedifferences 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 – Room 411

Matteo Bergamasco – Room 211

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 colouredsensations. 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 pointillismto 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 conceptualpaintings. 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 timesthey areinstead “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.

Szymon Brodziak – Room 304

Alessandro Busci – Room 406

Alessandro Busci works with different and heterogeneous materials: from cortensteel 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 timesreminds 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 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 architecturesand 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.

Felipe Cardena – Room 407

Eduardo Cardozo – Room 510

Tommaso Cascella – Room 218

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.

Paolo Cassara – Room 220

Marco Cingolani – Room 410

Aldo Damioli – Room 421

Fernando De Filippi – Room 202

Leonida De Filippi – Room 402

Antonio De Luca – Room 415

Ilaria Del Monte – Room 326

Ilaria Del Monte’s pictorial work can be inserted at a critical level within a research that starts from the experiences of early twentieth century painting, such as magic Realism, as well as from the influences of the New Objectivity, Metaphysic and Surrealism. The process of construction of Ilaria Del Monte’s universe can, in fact, be placed side by side with that of surrealist painters such as Magritte and Paul Delvaux, as well as certain atmospheres by Donghi and De Chirico, intent on representing the mystery of human existence through enigmatic and alienating scenes, immersed in a dreamlike and suspended atmosphere, often intimate and homely. They are scenes where it is almost never possible to understand the hidden meaning, nor the meaning of the characters’ gestures. At the centre of her visions, in the suffused balance of light and shadow, stands the female figure, a modern version of the ancient heroines of nineteenth century literature, which seems intent on celebrating mysterious magical rituals and obscure propitiatory rites. In a space shaken by surreal intuitions, Ilaria Del Monte paints suspended women, brides of the nature, creatures that turn their look beyond the limit of a single dimension. The theatre of these apparitions is always the home: the settings of the paintings are often domestic interiors, with outmoded wallpaper, peeling walls, draperies that invade the space, paintings that seem to come to life, furniture that becomes clothes, plants that mysteriously enter from the windows and, often, wild animals that interact with the same protagonists of the paintings. “My paintings”, explains the painter, “are daydreams”.

Ilaria Del Monte was born in Taranto in 1985, she lives and works in Milan. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, winning numerous painting awards: in 2010 she won the Patrizia Berlettani Next Generation prize at the San Lorenzo Gallery in Milan and in 2011 she was a finalist at the V Arte Laguna Prize at the Venice Arsenal. In the same year she inaugurated her solo exhibitions Vento dal Nulla in Venice and Window’s Tales at the Roberta Lietti Gallery in Como. In 2012 In the VBM20.10 Gallery in Berlin she has her solo exhibition Boarding Pass. In 2013 she was present at Arte Fiera di Bologna with the Roberta Lietti Gallery, at Affordable Art Fair in Brussels, Milan, Hong Kong and Seoul with the Studio Akka Gallery and at Art Moscow. In 2013 her personal exhibition When Teresa gets angry with God was held in Milan. In 2014 the Antonio Colombo gallery inaugurates her solo exhibition Out of this World.

Patrizia Della Valle – Room 520

Pino Deodato – Room 212

Nicola Di Caprio – Room 404

Nicola Di Caprio’s work investigates the border between visual art and music. Painting, photography, sculpture and installation are the languages that he uses to investigate and critically analyse the mechanisms that govern the music and entertainment industry. For Galleria Vik Milano, he alternates his collages, already strongly surreal and unsettling, with works from the CD Oversize series, which represents covers from the most well-known albums of pop and rock music, but on a gigantic scale, using the traditional technique of oil on canvas. His paintings thus become strange, affective totems of our personal musical geography. The collector will be able to buy their own “personal compilation” from the artist’s works that suits their musical taste. Recently, the artist has started a project creating very short animated GIFs on the themes of art, music and more generally costume, which continues his deconstruction and re-composition of contemporary cultural imaginary, using the hyper-pop language of digital GIFs, with a fast and unsettling mix of neo-Dadaism.

Nicola Di Caprio was born in Caserta in 1963. After spending long periods abroad, especially in America, he now lives and works in Milan. He is a visual artist, musician and graphic designer, whose works range across photography, installations, drawing and painting, investigating and reinterpreting the social, cultural and anthropological imagery of popular music, cinema and, more generally, of pop culture. In over thirty years of activity he has exhibited in galleries, museums, foundations and alternative spaces in Milan, Turin, Rome, Venice, Naples, New York, Paris, Madrid, London, Istanbul and Vienna. He was twice nominated for the prestigious Sovereign European Art Prize and in 2011 he took part in the 54th Venice Biennial.

As a musician he has played in numerous groups including Avion Travel in the mid-80s. He has also founded rock, jazz, improvisation and noise groups, still active in the Milanese circuit, including, WAST, Sparks, RawDuo! and Débris.

Gianluca DiPasquale – Room 201

Gianluca Di Pasquale is best known for his landscape paintings, “almost only featuring figures, painted with precise brush strokes inside a large white space.” The paintings presented for Galleria Vik Milano are part of a series of works openly inspired by the works of Doganiere Rousseau, the famous “naive” painter loved by Picasso and the protagonists of the artistic avant-gardes of the early 20th century. Di Pasquale describes a hypertrophic nature, suspended and silent, which recalls the fairy tale atmospheres of the customs officer Rousseau, where wild animals and humans live together in peace. His is an idea of strongly stylized jungle, in which animals, nature, flowers, different botanical species and rare human presences are drawn with great detailed precision and a richness of tones and colours, so as to create a dreamy, enchanting, strongly decorative atmosphere, with elements of great compositional precision, in which abstraction and figuration merge into a single large almost musical scenario. The artist invites us to follow him, while independently supporting ourselves, and to encourage us to stop and think about ourselves.

“I have watched Rousseau more carefully in recent years,” the artist said, “at a time when I was interested in archetypes. He best represents them all with a purity that I find only in children. When he paints a lion he represents a lion that is not a lion, but at the same time the archetype of the lion “.

The jungle by Di Pasquale, replicated on the walls of the bathroom in an immersive wallpaper that replicates the design transforms a daily space into a magical and dreamlike place, where man symbolically immersed in nature, regains contact with the solitary and intimate part of himself. That of Di Pasquale becomes at the same time a stylistic, compositional and colouristic investigation, but also research, both aesthetic and philosophical, into an invisible world and the hidden harmony behind the phenomenal appearance of the real world.

Gianluca Di Pasquale was born in Rome in 1971. He lived for many years in Milan, today he lives between Milan and a small city in central Italy. He began his exhibition activity in 1999 with the In-out exhibition at the Tatra Gallery in Bratislava. Later he participated in numerous group shows in Italy and Europe and in museums and private galleries. These include: Galleria S. Fedele, Milan (1999); Gallery of Modern Art, Rome (2000); Galería Luis Adelantado, Valencia, Spain (2004); Museum Géo-Charles, Echirolles, France (2005); Gallery the Orange, Seoul, Korea (2008); Prague Biennale 4 (2009); Italian Expo Pavillion, Shanghai (2012); and, Galleria D’Arte Moderna, Milan (2015). In 2006 he joined the Unicredit collection and in 2013 the UBS Art Collection.

Dubossarksy & Vinogradov – Room 205

Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, known in the art world simply as Dubossarsky & Vinogradov, are two Russian artists who have worked on the stereotypes of popular culture, media civilization, politics, glamour and the wild blending of themes, icons and subjects, according to a typical pattern of post-modern culture, combining the language of Soviet social realism, pop art and kitsch with which contemporary society is permeated. Their dreamlike and fairy-tale paintings, full of citations from the history of art, politics and culture, seem to propose, with a strong sense of seduction and irony, the ideal of modern Arcadia captured in fantasy style and populated by apparently happy and carefree beings. Colourful, cheerful and painted with a style that refers to the popular illustrations of the twentieth century, Dubossarsky & Vinogradov’s paintings describe bucolic, vaguely surreal scenes, often based on the aesthetics of appearance, money and sensuality. The faces of their characters seem to be taken indifferently from the advertisements of popular magazines and from the political propaganda posters of the last century, from the world of fashion, television and entertainment. In a process similar to collage Dubossarsky & Vinogradov have adopted the bright blue skies and pristine smiling faces of escapist magazine spreads and combined them in large-scale compositions inhabited by Hollywood stars, fashion models, the star system and international politics, strange picnics populated with celebrities in impossibly pastoral scenes, encounters between splendid models with bears, wolves and other wild animals, fantasy scenarios, children in celebration and dolls, flowers, enchanted landscapes or dazzlingly unreal snow storms over pristine cityscapes. Theirs is a subtle and ruthless criticism, conducted with great formal elegance and an impeccable and fluid style, of consumer society and the seductive power of advertising and fashion, seen in terms of modern forms of power and aesthetic and cultural homologation.

Vladimir Dubossarsky (born in 1964) and Alexandre Vinogradov (born in 1963) are two Russian artists who have been working together since 1994. They have been invited to exhibit at many exhibitions and public events such as the 50th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennial, the Sao Paolo Art Biennial, Valencia Biennial and other important international art shows. Their works are in the collections of major museums including: Hausder Geschichte (House of History) Museum in Bonn, Germany; Centre Georges Pompidou, France; Duke University Museum of Art, USA; Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, USA; MACI Museo Arte Contemporanea Isernia, Italy; Museum Of Contemporary Art of Avignon, France; Museum of Contemporary Art of Valencia, Spain; Secession Museum, Austria; State Tretyakov Gallery and State Russian Museum, Russia; and others. In 2014 the Vinogradov& Dubossarsky project came to an end and the two artists continued to work separately.

Teresa Emanuele – Room 303

Teresa Emanuele’s work focuses on the ambiguity of the photographic vision and the evanescence of the concept of “reality,” starting from landscape photography. Her work denotes a close attention to detail, a macro study that draws images of everyday life into an evanescent dimension, halfway between realism, dreamlike dimension and abstraction. Her most recent artistic research focuses on three dimensional and kinetic potential of black and white prints on transparent surfaces such as glass and methacrylate. The prints cast a shadow on the wall behind. The 3D effect is unknown to other forms of photography and printing.

Through the exploration of the projections of shadows, in a continuous challenge to the static nature of the photographic medium, the artist thus works on the thin gap existing between reality and imagination, between reflected image, dream and appearance.

Thanks to some technical devices, such as a careful study of the materials and the supports used, and through the multiplication of the surfaces on which the image that the artist places at the center of his goal is placed, the photographs of Teresa Emanuele become mysteriously mobile and evanescent, acquiring lightness, sensuality of the material and poetry.

The artist is also investigating all possible interactions between digital and analogical photography. In addition to film and darkroom printing she produces and edits with a printing press. Every photographed object is covered with a sort of aura, which makes it essential. An invitation to look around to see again the thickness, density and sensuality of the world, restoring to the real what, in the end, has always belonged to him: the right to be observed slowly with gratitude and praise. The natural or physical elements become images, necessarily linked to the artist’s emotional structure.

Teresa Emanuele was born in Rome in 1980. She earned a BA in law from Rome’s LUISS University and an LLM from Columbia University. It was living in New York City that fostered an interest in art when she began to take her first photographs, learning more about the medium along the way. In 2008 she attended the PhotoManhattan – a School of Photography, where she perfected technique in black and white and portraiture. She quit as an associate in a Wall Street law at the end of 2008 and moved back to Rome to more time to art.

Her exhibitions include: IN SOMNIA – Single Act at AdnKronos Museum, Rome and Spoleto, 2015; QVOD VIDES, TOTVM, Cultural Section of the Italian Consul General, Jeddah (KSA), 2013; Crossover – A dialog between the Chinese School of Hubei and the new Italian art scene at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013; 2014 – Pop Up Show, Hubei Museum of Art, Hubei (China); and Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Palacio Municipal, Mar del Plata (Argentina), 2015.

Rita Fischer – Room 502

Roberto Floreani – Room 305

Considered one of the key abstract artists of his generation, Roberto Floreani has developed a highly original style using the idea of a modular language characterised by circular shapes and the creation of a new material with which he makes his paintings, a sort of paper, combined with glass, coal, wood and recycled iron. The chromatic sensitivity of Floreani has a strong peculiarity, with a prevalence of contrasts between whites and blacks and the use of brighter tones, linked to the various ranges from orange to red and the suggestive, frequent use of Klein Blue. His research is a point of contact between European culture and Oriental philosophy of the body.

The Compenetrazioni Iridescenti of Giacomo Balla from 1912 (one of the starting points for Italian abstraction) is the visual and cultural points of reference of his work, as the abstractionism from Como of 1930s and up to the present day, combining an exclusive, stratified material research with the rigorous geometric definition of the reliefs, almost always characterised by the expressive abbreviation of the concentric.

Another feature of the artist’s work is his predisposition to conceive site-specific personal projects in direct consonance with the exhibition space, as shown in the space designed for his room in Galleria Vik Milan.

Roberto Floreani was born in Venice in 1956, but now lives and works in Vicenza.

From 1981 he realized several personal exhibitions in different museums in Italy and abroad. Invited to the Rome Quadrennial in 2005, he also represented Italy at the 2009 Venice Biennial. His work is on display in many of the main museum exhibitions dedicated to abstraction over the last 20 years. Among the institutions that have hosted his work are: the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, Palazzo Te in Mantua, the Rebaudengo Foundation of Turin, as well as personal exhibitions around the world and acquisitions in important museums and private and public collections.

As an expert on the futurist movement, Floreani is also the author of performances, lectures, debates and public readings of futurist poetry in theatres and public spaces in various Italian cities. He is also the author of books, essays and biographies of futurist artists such as the essay “Futurism Antineutral” (Silvana editoriale) and the biography Umberto Boccioni (Art-life, Mondadori Electa).

Giovanni Frangi – Room 409

Giuseppe Gonella – Room 203

Svitlana Grebenyuk – Room 419

Ester Grossi – Room 416

Antonio Guccione – Room 422

Antonio Guccione is an extremely refined professional photographer, who has worked for some of the most important magazines and major fashion companies. His work ranges from classic fashion photos, recognizable by the conciseness of the composition and their great expressive force, to specific projects, such as the Vanitas series. Here the artist has reinterpreted, according to the language of classical Seventeenth Century vanitas, iconic characters from history and art, such as Andy Warhol, Pollock, Leonardo da Vinci and photographs dedicated to the theme of the earth and the environment.

The photographs exhibited at Galleria Vik Milano, dating from the early nineties and taken almost exclusively in New York, see some of the most fascinating women in the panorama of the time as protagonists. Elle MacPherson, Tyra Banks, Sarah Jessica Parker and Carol Alt, Guccione’s subjects are the emblem of a beauty that needs no post-production retouching, further amplified by printing on paper with silver salts, which gives to the final result an almost pictorial value.

As the artist states: “Photography is art. The photographer does not express himself in the click, as many thinks. This is only the final element of an action. Behind is the individual”.

Antonio Guccione was born in 1947 in Sicily. He lived in New York for a long time, before settling permanently in Milan.

Becoming famous for the procession of famous faces that have passed in front of his lens, he has worked with the most prestigious fashion magazines, creating the most important advertising campaigns for Gucci, Prada, Versace, Yves Saint Laurent and many others. But above all he has dedicated his life to art and experimentation, becoming one of the most incisive interpreters of our society.

Of the many publications of books dedicated to his works, among the most important are: Absolute Statehood, Faces Of New York and Fashion And Faces. Portraitist of many celebrities, such as Richard Gere, Dustin Hoffman, Kate Moss, Tyra Banks, Giorgio Armani, Federico Fellini and Roberto Bolle. His works are exhibited in some of the most important museums and art galleries in the world

Ali Hassoun – Room 309

Ali Hassoun mixes the cultural influences of his homeland, Lebanon, with icons, symbols and images taken from the history of Western culture and contemporary artistic iconography. The themes dealt with in his paintings, with lightness, irony, great culture and visual refinement, tackle the themes of nomadism, contamination, multiple identities, the co-existence and simultaneity of different iconographic influences in the same reality.

His African women, his fleeing families, his tightrope walkers, who symbolically hover over the skyline of a great western metropolis, often stand out against the backdrop of a gallery of paintings ranging from Andy Warhol to Mario Schifano, Picasso to Capogrossi, up to Michelangelo reinterpreted as Italian Pop Art by Tano Festa. Hassoun’s identity is shaped in a continuous bewilderment of time and place, characters who reflect, observe and act in worlds not their own, bypassing time limits and mixing and stratifying visual and cultural references. Hassoun’s paintings are like stories using images that reflect the narrative forms of Arabic literature: stories that refer to other stories as in a game of Chinese boxes and that cross the entire history of human culture through its symbols and icons. In his most recent work the protagonists of the paintings are the most irregular and revolutionary artists in the history of Western art revisited in an ironic key, like a surreal mythology, in which all references are mixed together: from Frida Khalo and a rider of a Vespa, Jackson Pollock in the role of an electrician, to Basquiat who, like Judith with Holofernes, but with the severed head of Andy Warhol.

Ali Hassoun was born in Saida, in Lebanon, in 1964. In 1982 he moved to Italy to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. In 1992 he graduated from Florence University with a degree in Architecture. He now lives and works in Milan. He has added Italian nationality to his original Lebanese nationality and has been able to fill in gaps in areas that were lacking in his previous own individual experience.

Among the most significant recent personal exhibitions are: Ali Hassoun at the confluence of the two seas by Martina Corgnati at the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena (2010); Il POPolo wants, curated by Luca Beatrice, at the Piaggio Museum in Pontedera (2013); and, the Lebanese Pavilion at Expo Milan (2015).

Marcello Jori – Room 524

ML Langley – Room 316

Marcelo Legrande – Room 504

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

Marcelo Legrand nace en Montevideo, Uruguay en 1961. Inicia en 1977 sus estudios de dibujo y pintura en el Círculo de Bellas Artes con el maestro Héctor Sgarbi. A partir de 1981 y a lo largo de una década se dedica exclusivamente a trabajar con grafito sobre papel. Por un período de cinco años se concentra en una serie de cabezas utilizando esa técnica. Con esta obra obtiene múltiples premios e invitaciones para residencias en el exterior.

Estudia grabado con David Finkbeiner.

Se radica en Venezuela durante tres años. Por entonces retoma el color y desarrolla e investiga una técnica que incluye el uso de calor, agua y tintas chinas sobre papel vegetal. De regreso a su país se dedica a pintar telas en gran formato y profundiza en los papeles vegetales que había explorado en Venezuela, indaga en el grabado y realiza una serie utilizando discos de pasta como matrices.

En 1999 es premiado por la Fundación Batuz con una estadía en Atzella (Sajonia), Alemania, donde trabaja en su obra y dicta clases.

En 2018 obtiene el XXIII Premio Figari, en reconocimiento a la trayectoria.

Desde 2005 y hasta la actualidad trabaja con la Galería Sur, con la que participa en muestras y ferias internacionales. Expone individualmente y participa en muestras colectivas en Uruguay y en el exterior.

Obra en Hotel Vik, Milán 2019

Suite:

Técnica mixta sobre tela

3 lienzos de 80 x 60 cm

1 lienzo de 80 x 160 cm

1 lienzo de 80 x 260 cm

1 lienzo de 80 x 320 cm

1 lienzo de 80 x 520 cm

Baño suite:

Mural, intervención pictórica sobre empapelado preexistente.

Técnica mixta.

Baño suite 2:

Mural envolvente.

Técnica mixta.

Julian Lennon – Room 321

Marco Lodola – Room 322

Marco Lodola is one of the leading exponents of Italian new pop art. His work has always explored the myths and icons of contemporary popular culture. Considered one of the most famous and popular Italian artists he has collaborated with leading figures in culture and entertainment and with companies, working for advertising campaigns, TV shows and collaborating with some of the most popular performers of Italian music such as Timoria, the 883 by Max Pezzali and Jovanotti. His work is centred on the idea of the work of art as a container of light, energy, dynamism and movement. Lodola’s debut was linked to the New Futurists movement, theorised in the 1980s by the critic Renato Barilli, mixing the futurist idea of experimentation using new materials with advertising, interior decoration and design, and clothing. The artist uses perspex to create two-dimensional silhouettes in flat colours that refer to an idea of lightness, dance, movement, and, in other cases neon and the simple and effective language of advertising signs. The subjects of his works are the “classic” subjects of the consumer society, such as the Coca Cola insignia, vintage cars and other typical icons of the 60s and 70s, almost always characterised by an idea of rhythm and strong dynamism, such as dancers, musicians and rock stars, girls on Lambrettas or bikes, and sportsmen, superheroes and comic book characters.

Marco Lodola was born in Dorno (Pavia), where he still lives. In the early 1980s he founded the New Futurism movement with a group of fellow artists. Since 1983 Lodola has exhibited his works in major Italian and European cities such as Rome, Milan, Florence, Bologna, Lyon, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris and Amsterdam. He has taken part in exhibitions and projects for important companies such as Swatch, Coca-Cola, the Ferrari winery, Harley-Davidson, Ducati, Illy and others. In 1994 the People’s Republic of China invited him to exhibit his works in the former archives of the Imperial City in Beijing. In 1996 he began working in the United States in Boca Raton, Miami and New York. He took part in the 12th Rome Quadrennial and the 6th Monte Carlo Sculpture Biennial. In 2005, he created a poster for the Turin Winter Olympics and the pink jersey for the 88th Giro d’Italia. He also created new logos for several Italian television programmes like “X Factor”. In 2006 a light sculpture by Lodola appeared at Mexico City international airport. He also created the logo for the centenary of Gandhi’s pacifist movement.

He contributed to the 53rd Venice Biennial in 2009 with the “Balletto Plastico” (“Plastic Ballet”) installation dedicated to Futurist theatre. In 2010 he created the logo for the Umbria Jazz Festival poster and took part in the Shanghai World Expo.
In 2014 he exhibited his works in Moscow for Harmont & Blaine under the exceptional patronage of Sophia Loren and opened solo exhibitions at the Evita Perón Museum in Buenos Aires and the São Paulo Football Museum to celebrate the FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

Enrico Lombardi – Room 308

Enrico Lombardi has always painted fantastic landscapes while maintaining a strong symbolic connection with reality. He creates strongly evocative paintings with dreamlike implications, which seem to delve into the deep memory of our visual imagery. They are first of all mysterious and complex visual paradoxes built around mysterious and complex compositional scaffolding that at times touch abstraction. Rich of historical references to classical painting, especially the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and sacred iconography, they are often furrowed by shadows that unravel on the canvas in incongruent or paradoxical ways; as if to mix “inside” and “outside” in an inextricable visual maze in which it is difficult to recognize the beginning and the end. At their base an expanse of water which seems to refer to the idea of a “universal judgment” that transcends time and history to become a pure metaphor for the spirituality of existence. Inside them, under the complex compositional scaffolding, they hide the visual memory of the places that the artist has seen and in which he lives (the landscape of his homeland, Romagna), but also to the art he loves and from which it evolved: the geometry of fourteenth and fifteenth century paintings and Gothicism with its gold backgrounds and of its votive images. Their presence seems at times to suggest the existence of an otherworldly, dreamlike, fantastic, ideal place that is hidden behind the grid of reality.

Enrico Lombardi was born in Meldola, in the province of Forlì, in 1958 where he still lives. For over forty years he has been exhibiting continually in Italy and abroad. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions throughout Europe and in 2007 he was invited by Vittorio Sgarbi to participate in the “Italian Art 1968/2007” exhibition at the Palazzo Reale; in 2011 he was invited to the third edition of the “Maretti Prize” at the Pecci Museum in Prato and at the 54th Venice Biennial. In 2014 he was invited by Marco Goldin to the exhibition “Attorno a Vermeer” in Bologna, Palazzo Fava. In 2018 he set up a personal exhibition “Acheropita” at the Museo Civico delle Cappuccine in Bagnacavallo (Ravenna). His work is on display at the museums of Conegliano, Ravenna, Forlì, Rimini, Bagnacavallo and the Davis Museum in Barcelona.

Marta Mez – Room 204

In the works of Marta Mezynska, the palaces, shop windows and architectural views, even if perfectly recognizable in the details, lose all contextualization to appear suspended and frozen in a timeless atmosphere. She paints shop windows using strong colours and lively composition. The reality described by the artist appears static illuminated by a theatrical light, transparent and clear, or enclosed in darkness pierced by a few rarefied streetlights or flashes.

Each showcase of Martha seems familiar, they capture the imagination of places that we might have been or we may have passed by. Inspired by Edward Hopper, she is focused on the details, the lights are precise and objects are sharp, hyper-realistic and at the same time melt into the dream.

The play of light and shadow that enhances by contrast the geometries of the buildings, and allows a clear, distinct perception of real forms, in the stasis of the picture. Every single element is cleaned up in a calibrated composition, in which everything appears perfectly regulated in a symmetrical and formal correspondence, where these almost stripped buildings, reduced to the essence of their geometric shapes, become simple simulacra and witnesses of a fantastic and imaginary world.

Marta Mezynska’s work on urban architecture seems to testify the existential solitude of man, the inability to bring order into the chaos of everyday life and perhaps the desperate search to identify unattainable certainties in the eternal dispersion and flow of time.

Marta Mezynska (also known as Marta Mez), is a Polish artist based in Milan in Italy. She was born in 1981 in Białystok in North Eastern Poland.

She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2004 she contributed to set design for theatrical shows and films. What unites her work is her distinctive architectural element. Marta Mezynska exhibitions were presented in the Milano-Expo FEEDING THE PLANET, ENERGY FOR LIFE for expositions in Fabbrica del vapore (M-WAM – MILANO WORLD ARTS MAP) held under the theme DETAIL in Teatro Nuovo (Piazza San Babila).

Marta’s works are presented in private collections in Italy and abroad.

Claudio Monnini – Room 324

Gian Marco Montesano – Room 319

Painter, writer and theatre director, Gian Marco Montesano is one of the most popular contemporary Italian artists with participations in exhibitions and public events of international importance. A painter with an unmistakable style, Montesano combines a photographic figurative realism, nearly always in black and white, with an imagery that mixes, with great irony and disarming effects, the political, cinematographic and artistic culture of the Italian and European 20th century. His first works, made in the early seventies, are enlarged reproductions of Madonna and sacred images, ironically revisited in a postmodern key, according to the tradition of widespread popular culture, and covered with conceptual and theoretical meanings. At the end of the eighties, the artist was part of the Medialismo movement, the current of pictorial revival, characterized by a strong attention to the media and photography, where he was a precursor. Today the artist is known above all for his realist paintings that tell the popular culture of Europe of the last century, from the Second World War, to the economic boom, passing through Hollywood and neorealist cinema, up to political protest and the great contemporary world crises. Alongside these, however, the artist also uses apparently neutral images of landscapes, painted on rural or mountain backgrounds, children and teenager’s intent on games and other innocent occupations, like a long series of images taken from one of our albums of collective memories.

Gian Marco Montesano was born in Turin in 1949, he lives and works between Paris, Trento and Bologna. He is present in the art scene since the seventies, he was invited to the Venice Biennale in 2009 in the Italian Pavilion. He has held exhibitions in important international public and private spaces. A big public exhibition was dedicated to him in 2003 in Turin, curated by Luca Beatrice and Guido Curto, promoted by the Region. Intellectuals and critics have written about him, from Jean Baudrillard to Toni Negri to Achille Bonito Oliva.

Besides being an established painter, Montesano is a passionate theater director. His Company Florian, based in Pescara, has presented shows in Paris, Hungary and throughout Italy.

Elena Monzo – Room 206

Born in Orzinuovi (Brescia) in 1981. After the degree in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera (Milan), she entirely focused her work on the artistic creation and research on the feminine figure. In 2015 she was selected for the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, a prestigious artist residence in the heart of Shanghai for 6 months. In 2013 the artist’s works were shown during ArteFiera Bologna, and she was awarded with the Camera di Commercio prize in the city of Mantua during the contest Mantegnacercasi. The same year marks for the artist the meeting point with two different cultures -Far Eastern and Arabic- as she stayed in two artist residences, in Tamashima/Japan and Beirut/Lebanon, in the second half of the year.

Among Monzo’s personal exhibits: Nidi di Nodi di Bu (2008, in the Mantua branch of the Galleria Bonelli) and Inside (2007, in the Los Angeles branch). In 2012 the artist took part in the project Twin Room in Havana (Cuba), inside the Festival de Arte Jovem, and showed her works in solo shows at the Galleria Traghetto in Venice and the Galleria Colossi in Brescia. Her works were also exhibited in 2010 at the Contemporaryart show (Milan, Superstudiopiù) and in 2011 in the Cannaviello art studio (Milan). About Monzo’s collective exhibits, she took part in the B Creative B Factory show in Milan during the Fuorisalone in 2013, in the Homo Faber exhibition by curator Mimmo Di Marzio (2012, Milan), and in the show dedicated to the international movement of the pop-surralism Go with the Flow curated by Alberto Mattia Martini, in Lucca. In 2011, she participated at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia, Italian Pavilion – Lombardia, Palazzo della Regione (Milan), and to the exhibitions Faulty fables, curated by Carolina Lio, 00130 Gallery, Helsinki (Finland) and Elective Affinities, curated by Luigi Meneghelli, A.B.C. Arte Boccanera, Trento. In 2010, the artist was invited to the VII Biennale d’Arte Postumia Giovani 2010, curated by Beatrice Buscaroli, Museo dell’Alto Mantovano, Gazoldo degli Ippoliti (MN), to the collective exhibition curated by Chiara Canali The White Cellar in the former Fiat Palace in Turin and to the exhibition Giorni Felici at Casa Testori (Milan).

Tere F. Mouján – Room 518

Carla Mura – Room 307

Carlos Musso – Rooms 423 & 501

Anna Muzi-Falconi – Room 403

Tomoko Nagao – Room 219

Tomoko Nagao has always worked with a double language, pictorial and graphic, that is strongly influenced by the “superflat” aesthetic of the school of Murakami and Nara, with original takes on the choice of subjects (often linked to environmental and anti-consumerist themes), and a constant practice of ironic revisiting of themes and subjects taken from the great Western pictorial tradition on the one hand, and from popular iconography both Western and Eastern, on the other.

In her great compositions the brands of the big multinationals are often present, associated with telluric or seismic phenomena, a reference to the iconography of traditional Japanese painting, such as Okusai’s big wave, an ironic-pop review by the artist in contrast with the neo-capitalist aesthetic.

The iconography to which her works refer reflect the influences of manga culture, with a glance towards ancient Japanese tradition, with a neopop sensibility.

For Galleria Vik Milano, Tomoko has created a large Medusa’s head on the wall of her room, using the stencil technique, a typical subject of western Renaissance and Baroque painting, but revisited in a pop key; while on the bathroom mirror stands a series of small anthropomorphic drops of water, like little cartoon characters, created in collaboration with the ceramist Mariavera Chiari, which seem to swim in the space around the viewer.

Tomoko Nagao was born in 1976 in Nagoya, Japan and is one of the main contemporary artists of Micropop art. She studied in Japan assimilating Takashi Murakami’s Superflat style and Nara Yoshitomo’s stylised large-eyed figures. In London she attended the Chelsea College of Art. Today, she lives and works in Milan.

As the postmodern Japanese art movement founded by Takashi Murakami, her artworks are characterized by flat and emphatic images and defined outlines.

She has exhibited in numerous exhibitions and fairs all over the world, from Milan (Palazzo Reale), to Tokyo and Hong Kong.

In September 2015, her “Botticelli – The Birth of Venus with Baci” was exhibited at the Gemalde Galllery in Berlin and, in 2016, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London at the “The Botticelli Renaissance group show,” where it was considered by the critics to be one of the more interesting events of that year.

David Nido – Room 221

Davide Nido uses heterogeneous materials to create complex abstract universes, almost always formed by recurring elements that intertwine on the canvas with different variations and geometries that vary from time to time. He works with an atypical style using resins and bright coloured glues that he pours slowly on the canvas with wisdom and skill, creating sequences of continuing shapes and similar geometries: a rigorous and obsessive game. A real, fantastic work at the same time, extremely studied and calibrated where the appeal to traditional abstraction joins the search for new original forms. “The hot glue,” the artist has said, “is a material that stimulates me a lot for its effect of matter. Not by chance do I consider myself, more than a painter, a painter-sculptor”. For Galleria Vik Milano, an installation designed by the artist in 2014 was recreated for an exhibition in a museum in Wuhan (China), in which the surface of the painting spreads all over the wall of the room, creating an overabundant and amazing optical effect. The immersive effect of the work gives the viewer the idea of being immersed directly in the artist’s work.

Davide Nido was born in Milan in 1966.After graduating from the Brera Academy in Milan, he worked for several years in the studio of Aldo Mondino. From a young age he was noticed by important critics, such as Achille Bonito Oliva, who in 1992 invited him to participate in the “Imprimatur” exhibition at the ex-church of San Carpoforo in Milan. Many exhibitions have exhibited his works, in Italy and abroad: Galleria Continua, San Gimignano in 1994, Museo della Permanente, Milan, Fondazione Michetti (Pescara) in 2005, personal exhibitions at the Galerie Gianna Sistu in, Paris in 2007 and the Bonelli Contemporary, Los Angeles in 2008, the Farnesina Collection at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome, 2008, the “Terna Award” at the Temple of Hadrian, Rome, 2009 and the 53rd Venice Biennial at the Italian Pavilion in 2009. He died in Milan, at the age of 48, in 2014

Sergio Padovani – Room 420

Alessandro Papetti – Room 405

Papetti has worked extensively on the themes of disorientation and deconstruction of the contemporary landscape as a metaphor for a more general loss of existential and ethical references in today’s society. Among the main subjects of his paintings there are the urban landscapes, made with a fast, vibrant mark as if they were taken from the window of a running train, or of a desolate, endless countryside, flooded in an immense and desolate blue, pregnant with the feeling of an ancient and nameless drama. Industrial interiors, full of disused machinery, like relics of work that have now lost their reference points and basic values. The shipyards, the “water squares”, in which nocturnal or diurnal water becomes a means of estrangement, catapulting the spectator into a dimension that no longer seems to be part of the real in the strict sense, but rather of the territories of the unconscious and memory, of fear and inner darkness. His work on the landscape is, paradoxically, always and only a discourse on human existence: on the one who, looking at the landscape, or painting it, or photographing it, forms and gives it substance.

Alessandro Papetti was born in Milan in 1958, where he lives and works.

From 1995 to 2000 he worked between Milan and Paris. He has exhibited his works in important museums as: Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin; PAC, Milan; the Italian Cultural Institute, Tokyo; Villa Manin of Codroipo, Passariano, the Museum of Architecture in Moscow; Palazzo Penna in Perugia. In 2007 at the Musée des Années 30 in Paris, he exhibited a series of paintings dedicated to the Renault factories. Also, in 2007, Vittorio Sgarbi invited him to participate at the exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan Arte Italiana, 1968-2007. In September 2009, Palazzo Reale in Milan hosts his personal show curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. In 2011 he exhibited at the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennial. His work is part of the Intesa Sanpaolo collection and has been exhibited in the historic buildings of the Galleria d’Italia in Venice and Naples.

Fabiano Parisi – Room 412

Fabiano Parisi’s photographic research aims the lens at abandoned, marginal sites that are deprived of a human presence, frozen in the past, but still capable of telling a story.

The subjects of his photographs are places that have displayed their splendor in the past, but of which there has remained an atmosphere of decadence: churches, old luxury hotels now eaten by time and bad weather, ancient partly destroyed theatres, former factories, noble palaces now decayed. Places abandoned, forgotten by man and apparently locked in time, which bring to mind the concept of non-place theorized by the French anthropologist Mar Augé. The artist travels the world in search of these decadent buildings, not to document their disintegration, but to capture the sense of mystery, silence and immobility. His project, The World I Don’t See, can be sometimes extremely raw, at other times dreamlike and unsettling, traversing the whole world in search of forgotten memories.

The series presented at Galleria Vik Milano is part of a series of seven photographs taken in Biscayne Bay, off Miami, and focuses on a series of wooden stilts. Their origin dates back to the 1930 when a fisherman built the first shack on stilts above the water. The buildings were built on the mystery of mystery. Accessible only by water, the area became a place full of stories of adventure: stories of illegal alcohol and gambling led to several police raids on the dwellings, which have since become the headquarters of luxury clubs, gambling, smuggling and all illegal practices.

Fabiano Parisi was born in 1977 in Rome, where he lives and works. After his Psychology degree, he chose to make photography his career. He participated at the 54th Venice Biennial, at the Italian Pavilion at the Museo Nazionale of Palazzo Venezia in Rome. In 2012 at the Arte Laguna Prize he won a special prize for a solo show at Diana Lowenstein Fine Art Gallery in Miami. In 2010 he was the winner of the Celeste Prize International for photography in New York. He has had several solo shows, some of the most recent of which were held at the FotoLeggendo Photography Festival in Rome and at the Glauco Cavaciuti Art Gallery in Milan.

Marco Petrus – Room 414

Marco Petrus is one of the Italian artists who has worked most with great intensity and consistency on the theme of the urban landscape. The settings of his paintings are actually intended to represent only the symbolic scaffolding of the urban landscape rather than its realistic representation. The cities of Petrus are devoid of those external symbols (signs, traffic lights, writings, signs, cars, passers-by etc.) that usually distinguish the contemporary urban chaos. They are characterized by an increasingly rigorous and linear game of colours marked by clear and well-defined lines and flat backgrounds, in a search for the essentiality and linearity of the composition that characterizes his research. In this way his painting, with its ever-increasing analysis of the space of form, starting from the icons of the contemporary landscape, gradually changes also its language and formal approach on the canvas, progressively releasing itself from the simple figurative re-proposal of elements and glimpses of the urban landscape, to make, instead, rigorous and impeccable research into the “pure form” of architecture. The work of analysing the original form thus becomes the pretext for a broader search for the very meaning of painting and representation.

Marco Petrus was born in Rimini in 1960, but from early childhood he has lived with his family in Milan. From an early age he was interested in architecture and the urban landscape, particularly in Milan. The artist shows a specific interest in the architecture of the thirties and forties, the founding nucleus and anticipator of what will be the extraordinary urban developments of the Lombardian capital over the following decades. His interest in the urban landscape led him to collaborate with institutes and faculties of architecture from different countries, from the Triennale of Milan to the Centralnyj Dom Arkitektora in Moscow. Among the institutions and museums with which he collaborated are: the Venice Biennial, the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua, the Bilotti Museum in Rome, the Pac and Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Gallery of Modern Art in Genoa, the Marca of Catanzaro.

Pino Pinelli – Room 323

Pino Pinelli was born in 1938 in Catania, where he made his studies.

In 1963 he moved to Milan, where he lives and works. In those years, he was attracted and fascinated by the artistic debate, which was truly alive thanks to personalities as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani. He is considered one of the greatest exponents of “Analytical painting”. At the beginning of the Seventies Pinelli opened an experimental phase in his work, he focused on the pictorial surface and its vibrations, exploring the essential connection between tradition and innovation: The Topologies and Monochromes series were realised in this period. Surfaces became slightly uneasy, as if the artist wanted to offer us the tension of painting itself. Nevertheless, from 1976 Pinelli decreased the size of his paintings. Hanged on the walls his paintings looked like broken into fragments by an explosion and disseminated into space.

Pinelli’s work challenges the traditional idea of painting by creating works that mimic either outlines or geometric trails, and by utilizing the materials themselves to give solidity to the artwork. The artist put aside canvas and stretcher to focus on the concept of painting itself. By combining simple geometric shapes and predominantly primary colours, Pino Pinelli has created a unique art that cannot comfortably be categorized and yet serves as a powerful minimalist statement.

He has participated to many exhibitions in Italy and abroad:

In 1986 he was invited to the Venice Biennale, where he returned in 1997. He took part in the Rome Quadriennale in 1986 and 2006, and in the Lalit Kala Akademi Art Trienniale in New Delhi. He has exhibited in various museums, amongst which: the Galleria Civica in Modena, the Galleria Civica in Turin, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, Villa Arson in Nice, the Kunstverein in Hannover, Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, the Kunstverein in Bregenz, the Hochshule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, the Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Villa Croce in Genova, CAMC in La Spezia, Triennale in Milan. His works are in numerous permanent museum collections.

Adriano Pompa – Room 216

Adriano Pompa is a painter and sculptor of great refinement, who’s work ranges over different techniques: from oil painting, engraving, sculpture to ceramics. His tale is consistent and gripping full of references to classical fourteenth to sixteenth century traditions, Baroque culture and classical mythology; from majolica and interior decoration, a mirror of many regional schools of the best Italian craftsmanship. His painting has precise and rigorous linguistic schemes: the use of gold leaf, engraving, drawing, the insertion of other languages within the pictorial medium, to form a complex pictorial framework, a wedge of references to the history of art but also to that of literature. His is a pictorial and linguistic game that combines vision and intellect, painting and reasoning, which leads the viewer to wander between enchanted plains, lush landscapes full of wonderful plants and never seen before, mythological figures, adventures and feats of very strange beings that seem to come from an ancient medieval bestiary. The genre in which Pomp works is in fact that of the fantastic and the symbolic: he has chosen to recover the symbolic dimension of existence, to return to see the objects, the actions, the expressions as the symbols of a reality which, though changing in its external aspects, does not change however in its essential characteristics. In fact Pompa tells us about a symbolic and fantastic world, through the symbols that the history of art has always used: knights, helmets, flying dragons, enchanted and golden landscapes. His is a digression in that boundless territory that is the history of art, fishing now from a sixteenth century vase now from a detail found in a baroque portal, stealing suggestions of great Italian poetry from Ariosto to Dante, to return them to us in the form of painting or sculpture. For Galleria Vik Milano, Pompa has thus chosen to recreate a room as a paintings gallery in imitation of those of the seventeenth century, in which the paintings, the engravings, the objects follow each other, almost to the ceiling, matched according to their size and colour so as to create a single visual story.

Adriano Pompa was born in Rome in 1965, he learnt artistic techniques by going to his father’s shop, the painter Gateano Pompa, from whom he inherited the passion for figurative art and for the themes of fantasy and magic. After making his debut in 1989, together with his father, at the Rondanini gallery in Rome with a presentation by Vittorio Sgarbi, he began to exhibit systematically in galleries and public spaces. He exhibited in Rome, Milan, Bologna, Ferrara, Piacenza and in many Italian museums. In 2003 he participated in the exhibition The modern way of Rosso Fiorentino and today’s painting at the Sandro Parmeggiani Museum in Cento. After a solo exhibition at the Casa Cini in Ferrara (2004) he showed 26 paintings on the theme and atmosphere of the Orlando Furioso. In 2007 he exhibited in Washington and in the following years he took part in collective exhibitions in many Italian and European cities. He has also received many requests for the creation of large bas-reliefs for the external decoration of facades and courtyards of buildings and country villas in Piacenza, Milan, Rome and Tuscany.

Alfredo Rapetti – Room 312

Alfredo Rapetti is known for his work as a lyricist and as a painter. Like his father, Mogol, known for his collaboration with Lucio Battisti, Rapetti is also a lyricist: in over thirty years, under the pseudonym of Cheops, he has written song lyrics for Laura Pasini, Adriano Celentano, Carlos Santana, Mina. In addition to his lyricist activity, Rapetti is known in the art world as a contemporary painter. This activity has already given him a lot of satisfaction with exhibitions in Italy and abroad in important museums and galleries. His training as a painter comes from the attendance of his maternal grandfather, Alfredo De Pedrini, who from a very young age opened the doors to the world of Milanese art. His pictorial activity began between the sixties and seventies, combining his passion for words with that for pictorial matter. In this way, through a sophisticated technique, the stitching, the artist introduces texts, phrases and words on the pictorial surface. In this way his work addresses existential and universal themes, adding a psychological and conceptual character to the artist’s pictorial work.

Alfredo Rapetti was born in Milan in 1961. After having attended the school of Comics in Milan at a very young age, Rapetti worked for a few years with the masters Alessandro Algardi and Mario Arlati. From 1998 he began a collaborative work for the photographer Fabrizio Ferri and from 1999 he exhibited his works in numerous solo and group exhibitions that found great success among critics. At the Museo della Permanente in Milan, at the Salon d’Automne, the Espace Charenton and Grand Palais in Paris, at the M’ARS Contemporary Art Museum, at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, at the the Riga Foreign Art Museum in Riga and at the Venice Biennale. Personal exhibitions include those at the Cà d’Oro Gallery in Rome, at the KPMG Foundation in Berlin, at the Maretti Arte Monaco Gallery in Montecarlo, at Villa Olmo in Como, at the Albergo della Rovere in Palermo and at the Certosa di San Lorenzo in Padula di Salerno.

Rendo – Room 320

Sandi Renko – Room 301

Sandi Renko works on the double path of art and design. “I have always experienced creativity as a fundamental component of my life and art and design have been the two constitutive polarities. I could even say that art and design are for me one inside the other,” says the artist. Renko’s projects and works are always based on modularity and repetition: the area in which his artistic path develops is that of the tradition of analytical painting, a current born in the sixties and attentive to the relationships between surface, sign and color, as in the near and parallel fields of kinetic and programmed art, focused on the study of the mechanisms of vision and on the aspiration to a pictorial and plastic rendering of optical phenomena and light.

Sandi Renko’s research focuses precisely on the dynamic relationships between the individual elements that make up his visual lexicon, from the sign, to the pictorial surface, treated as a texture and as a repetition of individual formal modules, to the incidence of light on the surface of the painting. His conceptual investigation is aimed at probing the perceptual and sensory variables aroused by the painting, aiming at a dynamic relationship with the viewer, in order to involve him on an interactive level. The artistic practice of Sandi Renko is set on a solid geometric structure of the work, through the repetition of an apparently elementary scheme, based above all on the motif of the cube. The modular development of the space is approached with great methodological rigour, through a sequence of variables. By making use of simple vertical lines that differ from one another in length and thickness, the artist manages to create volumetric effects that assume kinetic characteristics if viewed from different points of view, they change according to the point where you look at the picture. The formal rigour, as well as the solid structural setting, are expertly calibrated by the compositional harmony and refinement of the tonal backgrounds, following a sequence of innumerable combinations, in a sort of elementary grammar of space that can be replicated indefinitely.

Sandi Renko was born in Trieste in 1949. He lives and works between Padua and Trieste. At the beginning of the seventies, he moved to Padua where he opened a design, visual communication and art direction studio, collaborating with leading companies in the furniture and furnishing accessories sector. In Padua he met Edoardo Landi and, stimulated by the artistic and intellectual context that was still affected by the experiences of the kinetic and programmed art of group N, he participated in group shows and extemporaneous events. The affinity with programmed art and optical art is consolidating, thus defining its artistic language and its personal technique. Over the years he has continued to produce design and art in parallel with equal rigour and method, with creations of great cleanliness and balance in both fields. Encouraged by Alberto Biasi, he intensifies his artistic production and exhibits regularly in group and solo shows in Italy, Slovenia and Austria.

Shinya Sakurai – Room 424

Moises Santos – Room 318

Moises Santos works with painting and installation on the relationship between natural and artificial forms. His canvases, characterized by a great energy of matter and color and by the repetition and overlapping of elements of rounded shape, are a hymn to the vitality of natural forms: although nourished by experiences that refer to the tradition of classical abstraction, the Brazilian-born artist looks at reality as a territory of infinite suggestions and experiments, escaping from any definition regarding his style and his work. In fact, the artist defines himself as an artist in constant evolution and change, who tries to escape any kind of classification. The subjects of his canvases refer to a starry sky, a portion of the universe, a seabed, the reflection of water on a surface, or the internal part of a natural organism. They are reflections on the relationship between micro and macro, between forms of the infinitely small and those of the infinitely large, such as the universe. But those of Moises Santos are also visual metaphors of a formal universe characterized by fluidity, instability and an uncontrolled vital energy. With his work, the artist wants to tell the sense of fragility that man experiences every day, that state of insecurity and transience that places him in front of the power of a superior force, that of God or of nature that inevitably shows human limits. humans. “These compositions are a projection of universal journeys in which I express myself through color,” says the artist.

Moises Santos was born in Aracaju, Brazil, in 1972. His love for colors, dance and music soon turned into an expressive urgency which coincided with his arrival in Italy, where he began its first productive season. Today he lives and works in Italy between Milan, where he has his atelier on the Naviglio Grande, and Erba. Distinguished for his personality and for the energy released by his works, already in his first group and personal exhibitions, Moises Santos experimented with mixed techniques, using acrylic, acrylic plaster and oil, to create forms without form. In 2005 he created on the Naviglio Grande in Milan paper small boats, a temporary installation linked to a public art project, the first of a long series of artistic installations that invaded all of Lombardy, Italy and even abroad. He has also exhibited in numerous public and private museums such as the Civic Aquarium of Milan, Castel dell’Ovo in Naples, international art fairs.

Mario Schifano – Room 208

Nina Surel – Room 207

Nina Surel is a multidisciplinary artist whose work best described as an on-going exploration of the deepest recesses of our collective unconscious from a feminist standpoint. Using her body as a symbolic place and a privileged subject of her research, she leads us into dark labyrinths populated by our own fears and prejudices. Addressing core issues associated with childhood, femininity, history and social stereotypes, Surel’s body of work stands as a witty, looming yet convincing portrayal of modern woman.

In her paintings mixed media were pushed to their limits to configure a strategy oriented to blur the lines between reality and fiction, through the stratification of techniques – photography, painting, digital intervention, assemblage – and objects: porcelain, buttons, dresses, jewellery. The accumulation confers on these artworks a peculiar and steep trait of decadence and obsession; the artist becomes the object and the subject of this transformation, playing the roles of the different characters within the narrative and constantly changing her features. The overload lets the works protrude always, with bravery and audacity, their identity pointing towards the kingdom of kitsch, gaining the creation of perturbing worlds that challenge the viewer: duplication, reproduction, mirroring are the main functions of this process. The resin freezes all the elements and relationships, draining figures, landscapes and objects like a wrapping: the artificial balance of the levels crystallised in time and space.

Before 2001, in her native country, Argentina, Nina Surel studied both Costume and Set Design at The Art Institute of the Teatro Colón and Fashion and Textile Design at the Architecture & Urban Planning College of the University of Buenos Aires. After 2001, having moved to the United States, she poured elements from that academic background into the production of paintings, installations, assemblages, photos and videos. The result is an ever-widening array of techniques that allows her to unravel archetypes, prejudices and repressed aspirations through enthralling aesthetic illusions. The baroque and surreal findings of Surel’s exceedingly personal quest for a non-patriarchal version of the eternal feminine have been exhibited widely in institutions and galleries across the United States, Europe and South America, including the Naples and Boca Ratón Museum of Art (Florida), The Chiesa di San Matteo, Luca, Italy, the Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach, California), and The Museum of Contemporary Art and Miami International Airport in Florida.

Cristiano Tassinari – Room 314

In his works, Cristiano Tassinari combines a continuous work of experimentation on the media and artistic techniques with a strong and well-defined stylistic figure, in which abstract and realist painting, photography, objects, signs, sculptures alternate on the space of painting, giving life to practically perfect compositions, in an hybrid between different linguistic and expressive planes. In fact the artist has been working for years on the relationship between sign, colour, shape, memory, through a swirling accumulation of elements, as in a repeated overlapping of different geological layers. In recent years, he has stylized and amplified his approach to artistic practice to the extreme, in an articulated and complex research, which tends to an ever greater stylization and a multiplication of visual elements in a single formal corpus. Here, then, the work itself no longer tends to a classic composition, but rather to a sort of horizontal and only apparently chaotic accumulation of visual suggestions, capable of activating in us associations of distant or removed ideas and visual memories. “I am interested,” explains the artist, “in the dialectic between order and chaos that is established in the artistic work, combining different media, but also forms, colours, languages, that refer to completely different traditions and aesthetic areas.”In this way, today, the complex and layered works of Cristiano Tassinari, between oil painting, drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations, speak to us of a formal universe in which even the objects of the street and everyday life, bodies, faces, the grids and abstract structures become materials of a single visual universe, which reproduce in a symbolic form the pitfalls, short circuits and contradictions of phenomenal reality.

Cristiano Tassinari was born in Forlì in 1980 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He lives and works in Berlin. Winner of the Italian Factory Prize for young Italian painting in 2006, and the Michetti Prize in 2007, he has participated in numerous personal and collective exhibitions, both in Italy and abroad, especially in Germany and in particular Berlin, but also in non-European countries such as South Korea. In 2011 he was invited to participate in the Venice Biennial. His works are housed in various museums and public and private foundations, such as the Mar di Ravenna, the Michetti Foundation of Francavilla al Mare and the Pinacoteca Comunale di Forlì.

Artists