Artists

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 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 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, 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.

Marco Casentini’s works are realized according to different coloured modules, rigidly scanned based on an articulated and harmonious design, reminiscent of the musical score and in which parts of Plexiglas supports are sometimes superimposed, becoming a sort of mirror through which the spectator seems to “enter” directly into the painting. Casentini’s works are realized with a traditional technique, however breaking bridges with abstraction in the canonical sense. Sometimes, as the artist has experimented in many public exhibitions (and also in the installation in his room at Galleria Vik Milano), Casentini expands his coloured modules beyond the canvas to cover walls and floor of the entire exhibition space, according to a dynamic-colourist perspective that seems to refer to an idea of a “universal work of art”, which has its references in the historical avant-garde lesson. The dynamism of his chromatic rhythm, which sometimes seems to refer to a strongly conceptual and synthetic reduction of the urban architectural space, thus manages to invade the entire space, where the artist inserts small coloured works, sometimes hemispherical, that mingle with the pattern of the background, helping to make labyrinthine, ambiguous and iridescent the overall view of the work, continuously overturning the perspective of the vision as a whole.

Marco Casentini was born in La Spezia, Italy. He graduated at the art high school in Carrara in 1980, and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara in 1984. Casentini has exhibited his artwork in Italy, the US, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Australia, and Austria. Casentini’s work appears in many private, corporate and public collections, including: the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany; The Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland, OH; Mestna Galerija, Nova Gorica, Slovenia; and in Italy, Civica Raccolta del Disegno, Salò; Fondazione Bandera per l’Arte, Busto Arsizio; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Sesto Calende; MAPP Museo d’Arte Paolo Pini, Milan; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Calasetta, CAMeC, La Spezia; and the Università degli Studi, Pavia. Casentini was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2005. He and his family moved from Milan to Hermosa Beach in Los Angeles County in 2007, though he frequently travels to Milan where he maintains a studio and teaches painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Brera.

Paolo Cassarà was born in 1968 in Monreale (Pa). He lives and works in Milan since 1987 when he began his artistic career. He held his first solo exhibitions in Turin, Milan and Boston (USA).

From the beginning Cassarà was inspired by an everyday imagination, especially female figures, which the artist was able to reread through the traditional technique of polychrome terracotta, renewing the codes and reinterpreting the iconographic references. For the artist the road is a source of inspiration, through ironic and subtly melancholy works he reveals the search for an identity in front of a system dominated by conformism and ephemeral fashions. Models, actresses, starlettes, DJs, travelers and managers are the protagonists of his sculptures, they represent the reference models of a widespread and pervasive aesthetic in continuous transformation, as fashion in the modern consumer society.

He has also participated in several group exhibitions in museums and public institutions 2003 “The New Italian Art Scene” at the 50th Venice Biennal and in Strasbourg at the European Parliament. In 2007 he showed at the PAC of Milan in the exhibition”Street Art, Sweet Art”. In 2013 he was invited at the exhibition dedicated to Guido Crepax at Palazzo Reale in Milan, in 2017 “Aeterna”, Triennale of visual arts in Rome, Palazzo Velli, Rome.

Marco Cingolani is a painter with a strong evocative, lyrical and fantastic power. At first his paintings portrayed historical, biblical and mythological figures, in a convulsive mix of references and quotations from the history of art, current affairs, politics and the European spiritual and philosophical traditions. In recent years his painting has increasingly turned towards greater freedom of expression, based above all on a clever use of colour. Today Cingolani’s work seems to explore the infinite possibilities of matter and colour outside any didactic, representative or decorative urgency. His work is extremely joyous, visionary, magical, fairy-tale, transforming itself into a language capable of going beyond the historical and narrative contingency, relying solely on the evocative, emotional and allusive capacity of colour and form. It is a sort of magical and surreal universe, in which human presences seem to become evanescent as in a dream.

Even spirituality, deprived of any dogmatic reference, has a prominent place in Cingolani’s work. Biblical and mythological subjects, sacred themes and allusions to the great tradition of religious painting are often depicted in the evanescent and poetic language of the Milanese artist, cancelling and overturning the parameters of the traditional figurative representation, renewing the sense of a new form of contemporary spirituality.

Marco Cingolani was born in Como in 1961 and moved to Milan in 1978 where he currently lives and works. He has participated in exhibitions in museums, public institutions and galleries in Italy and abroad. Among the most important are the exhibitions at the Pecci Museum in Prato, at the PAC in Milan, at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, at the Promotrice delle Belle Arti in Turin, at Gamec in Bergamo. In 2009 he was among the artists invited to represent Italy at the Venice Biennial.

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).

Aldo Damioli has always worked on the urban landscape with a style that recalls what the Eighteenth-Century painter Canaletto used to paint one of the most important metropolises of the time, Venice. The artist has often painted New York, symbolically naming his paintings Venice-New York in homage to Canaletto. He also depicted other cities, starting with Milan, attributing, with a subtle conceptual operation, the style of classical landscape painting to the profiles of today’s metropolises. He creates such precious urban views that, while faithfully reproducing the structure and buildings of the great metropolises of today, they seem to have lost all resemblance to their real form. The effect is of a strong displacement. His is a conceptual painting, which aims to displace commonplaces and stereotypes of the contemporary world. To do this the artist uses a deliberately non-contemporary style, in order to undermine the whole system of our vision. For the Galleria Vik Milano, the artist has chosen some paintings dedicated to Milan, immersing the Lombardian city in a disturbing nocturnal atmosphere that seems to come from a noir novel.

Aldo Damoli was born in Milan in 1952, where he lives and works.

His work, rich in references to the history of Italian art but centered on the images of the great contemporary metropolises, is considered one of the most interesting examples of reflection on the contemporary landscape.

Damioli has participated in numerous group exhibitions at different museums and public institutions: among others, the Venice Biennial and the Rome Quadrennial. Among the public museums that have hosted his works, there are Palazzo Reale and the Pac in Milan, the Rupertinum Museum of Salzburg, the Modern Art Gallery of Budapest, the Gallery of Modern Art of Genoa and Bologna and the Promotrice of the Fine Arts of Turin.

Fernando De Filippi is a multifaceted artist: his research spans all languages, from painting, photography, video, performance, to installation and monumental sculpture. In his early phase he used informal painting, but from the late sixties the artist perceived the suggestion of political and social themes, entering the “revolutionary” debate of 1968 through painting and performance. From the eighties onwards the enigmatic silences of a Mediterranean cradle of myth emerge, the enigmas of improbable cities, of simulated temples and symbolic constellations, but also alchemical and cerebral visions. Starting in the 2000s, the artist investigated issues related to myth and classical architecture, in which the shapes of trees – painted on canvas or drawn with inks on large sheets of rice paper – become architecture. And it is in the incessant search for the construction of form, through the repetition of thousands of small graphic signs, that what for De Filippi is also a reflection on the profound meaning of drawing and painting.

Fernando De Filippi was born in Lecce in 1940. He lived in Paris and then in Milan, where he lives and works. He was director of the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera (1991-2009), the Academy of Verona from 2009 to 2011 and had a leading role in artistic politics in Italy. The list of exhibitions in Italy and abroad is long. He has participated in five editions of the Venice Biennial, four editions of the Rome Quadriennial and the Milan Triennial in 1981. He has also exhibited, amongst others, in numerous public museums in Italy and abroad: Palazzo Reale in Milan, Fondazione Mudima of Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin, the Hayward Gallery in London, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and the Museum of Modern Art in San Paolo and Rio de Janeiro.

Leonida De Filippi has been working for many years on the concept of the media icon, pictorially reproducing news images, family photos or portraits, manually recreating the individual pixels, almost always in black and white, all with extreme stylization and strong formal elegance, which openly refer to the atmosphere of the early Pop age. For Galleria Vik Milano, the artist has created an entire environment with his latest series of works, all focused on the theme of circularity. In fact, the protagonists of the room are paintings that, having overcome all figurative needs, concentrate on the symbol of the circle, reducing the iconography to the essential and thus arriving at abstraction. The circles, depicted in flat colours bright and strongly contrasted, seem to capture the viewer’s gaze towards their interior, in a spiral movement of great formal impact, which recall optical illusions and advertising graphics of the seventies. In this way, the user of the work is invaded by a sense of joyous estrangement from reality and brought from the harmony of the forms to a sense of inner concentration.

Leonida De Filippi was born in Milan in 1969, where he lives and works.

He has exhibited all over the world, from Paris, Lugano and London, to China and South Korea. Among the museums that have hosted his works are: the PAC in Milan, the Mart Museum of Contemporary Art, Rovereto, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany and the Gallery of Modern Art in Genoa. In 2017 he participated in the Wuhan Festival of Arts in China with a travelling project that saw the installation of his circular paintings around the city and the involvement of the city’s inhabitants.

Antonio De Luca alternates his activity as a professional photographer with that of an abstract artist, using various expressive means: from analogical to digital photography, passing through screen printing and digital image sampling techniques.

At times, he creates his works by superimposing new cycles of photographs on previously rolled rolls of film and thus obtaining completely random effects of juxtaposition of different images with a post-Dadaist process. The effect is often that of a “surrealism of the everyday”, which leads to reflect on the curious or incongruent aspects of reality in the era of the “disappearance of the real”, now definitively replaced by the great game of virtual entertainment.

De Luca is also a fashion photographer and storyteller of female beauty: in the course of his long career that has unfolded between fashion and advertising photo shoots, including glossy magazines and production houses, he has experimented a lot with photography, adhering always to the surrounding reality and working on the search for beauty, from the female body to nature.

Antonio De Luca was born in Sicily in 1956, but has lived and worked in Milan for many years. As a photographer he has worked and published for numerous magazines, publishing houses, including Rizzoli, Mondadori, Rusconi, Condè Nast, Elle Japon, Madame Figarò. He has won prestigious awards such as the international Art Donkey Prize. He has also produced advertising videos, catalogues, calendars, publications for many companies and agencies. As an artist he has taken part in numerous exhibitions, festivals and events, including the Venice Biennial, Cronache Vere and Ritratti Italiani at Spazio Consolo, Milan. On TV, San Fedele Space, Milan; Montblanc Art Project 2001 with the video “Bohéme” in Tokyo and Sidney.

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.

At the centre of Pino Deodato’s sculptural and pictorial work there is always the man: a simplified, stylised man, always intent on strange and mysterious solitary occupations. It is man reduced to his purest essence, lost in the mystery of his own individuality, the man who seeks his own way and his own sense of being in the world and relating to his fellows.

Those of Deodato are poetic and enigmatic visual stories, fables of the everyday in which we can identify ourselves for their alienating lyricism, very delicate theatrical pieces with shaded and surreal contours, always and only built with a few symbolic elements: a forest, a garden, a bed, a room, a tree, a wardrobe, or, at times, the whole world on which man himself, light and ephemeral, finds himself walking, lonely and disoriented.

The poetics of Deodato are above all linked to the elementary simplicity of everyday objects and actions, full of stories and humanity. “I try to tackle complex issues in a simple way,” says the artist, “to make difficult topics accessible to everyone.”

For Galleria Vik Milano, Deodato has created an installation comprising of around thirty small sculptures linked one to the other by technique (the works are all made of ceramic) and by the great poetry of the subjects: men and women taken in silent meditations, in reciprocal exchange of gestures of affection or agreement, in mysterious conversations with animals.
Pino Deodato was born in Nao, Vibo Valentia, in 1950. He arrived in Milan in 1969, where he lives and works.

Since his youth he has attracted the attention of critics, exhibiting in important exhibitions in Europe dedicated to the new Italian art. Since the 1980s his production, divided between pictorial and sculptural activity, has been exhibited in public museums and important private Italian galleries as well as in festivals and public events dedicated to urban installations.

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 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.

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’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.

An eccentric and singular personality in the world of contemporary art, the artist has for years used a mix of painting, photography and collage to create a universe that is at once abstract-geometric, finely magical, decorative and highly original and autonomous, making him a very interesting case in today’s panorama. His language ranges from painting to sculpture to installation and creation of eccentric objects hovering between art and interior design.

For many years Corrado Fabbri has been carrying out very original linguistic research, where the forms of geometric abstraction unexpectedly dialogue with Mondrian’s Neo plasticism, Kandinsky’s grammar, Paul Klee’s playfulness or with the abstract expressionism of the American school, with the compositional structure of Futurist dynamism, with Matisse’s sense of colour or, again, with the wise play of references and relations of a purely pop style. Characteristic of his work are the game of strong colours and flat tones, the contamination between different and often “industrial” mechanical materials, such as plastics, fabrics, acrylic colours, oil, wood, and iron.

The philosophy that underpins the entire artist’s work is placed in an area of reinvention of the forms of the world, starting from a linguistic, philosophical and aesthetic pastiche that freely draws its references from different areas: from the icons of the modern to those of tradition, from the history of the avant-garde to that of Art and Craft, from newspaper images to interior design, from the language of classical tradition to the media, from traditional genres of art history to those of cinematographic and literary origin.

Corrado Fabbri was born in Lovere and lives and works in Milan. He has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in Milan and other Italian cities. He has collaborated with festivals and important national events such as the Alzheimer Fest.

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.

www.ritafischer.org

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).

For many years Giovanni Frangi’s pictorial work has been taking place in the name of a progressive loss of boundaries, the dividing line between languages and different techniques (he uses painting, drawing, sculpture and installation), between the figurative and abstraction, between the representation of nature and an idea of ​​an interior landscape. Nature is a recurring theme in Frangi’s work: since its inception the artist’s path has concentrated on investigating the natural world in all its aspects: woods, seas, rivers and countryside. Although the starting point is always apparently realistic, an expressionist style and a tendency towards informal painting lead him to recreate, with ever-changing means, a transfigured, imaginary reality, recreated with an unmistakable brushstroke of great expressive power. He always seems to move between an approach to natural data and in parallel to his continuous journey towards fantastic territories.

Giovanni Frangi was born in 1959 in Milan, where he still lives and works.

He has collaborated with numerous foundations and museums in Italy and abroad including: Sala del Cenacolo, Montecitorio, Rome; Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan; Villa Panza, Varese; the Modern Art Gallery, Udine; the Diocesan Museum, Milan; MART, Rovereto; the National Museum of San Matteo, Pisa; the MAXXI Museum, Rome and the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.

“Loredana Galante uses game processes and falsely emulative rituals to give reality the stability of the dream”.

Achille Bonito Oliva

Loredana Galante plays with the constant redefinition of meaning and use of the objects and images of our everyday life, drawing from the dreamlike imagery as well as from the most recent iconography, in a mix of different languages, painting, performance, sculpture, video.

All her works births within an intimate rituality, interwoven with memory, characterized by a elegance of the past. A volcanic and irreverent artist, Loredana Galante plays tirelessly with the stereotypes of everyday life with a particular look at female identity. Travel souvenirs, bird nests, cups, calligraphic signs, wedding cakes, dresses, embroideries, immense clothes from which eggs hang like ripe fruit, painted flowers, embroidered words, insects in evening dress from mysterious fairy tales, weaver spiders dressed in lace, bird houses transformed into handbags, fountains from which orange juice drips are just some of the crazy and fantastic creations of the artist.

Everything enters in the artist’s work and becomes a joyful and happy parallel universe, recreating an all-female, scratchy and irreverent alternative everyday life, never taken for granted.

Loredana Galante reinvents a new design, making current ancient and forgotten things, recreating a dreamlike, funny and a little crazy world. “My paintings are tapisseries in which makes itineraries among objects, embroideries, animals accomplices of some spell, of a ritual where I try to put back order in the turmoil, with the care and the help of spiders weavers”, says the artist.

Loredana Galante was born in Genoa in 1970 and lives and works in Milan.

She has won numerous awards and participated in artist residencies in Italy, Ireland, Germany, Burkina Faso. During her artistic activity she has exhibited in Italy and abroad, including Tokyo, Dubai, Hannover, Strasbourg, Nice, New York, Tehran, Ouagadougou, Shengzhen.

She has performed in Shengzhen, China, Tehran at the GAM in Genoa, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Villa Croce, Turin, Rome, Milan, Tokyo, Dubai, Bolzano, Hanover, Strasbourg, Nice, New York and many other Italian and European cities.

During her training between the United States and Eastern Europe, Eloisa Gobbo has dealt with different media, from photography to painting, from sculpture to installation. In fact her work is characterized by a rigorous compositional and formal structure, where ornamental motifs, similar to modern mandalas, geometrical drawings and colourful decorative patterns are combined and often overlapped to the point of becoming almost unrecognisable, alongside images taken from the world of advertising, design, fashion and popular culture.
Her work has been noted for its use of colour, the incorporation of motifs from both Eastern and Western decorative tradition and popular culture, and for its flat surfaces. Among the recurring motifs are flowers, abstract, geometric and organic ornaments, arabesques, popular logos, maps, characters and signs.
The result is colourful and charming works, with a cheerfulness and a strong sense of colour, where a conceptual layout and a neo-pop taste coexist also on different supports and materials.
In recent years, she has expressed her creativity using different media such as painting, sculpture and digital graphic artworks. Her main interest is in decoration as a form of expression of personal and social content and repeated pattern, which make a colourful show in her paintings and carpets.

Eloisa Gobbo is an Italian artist currently based in Padua, Italy.
She has won some competitions to create public works of art, such as those for the Pile-dweller Museum in Trento or for a Nursery School in Ravina, Trento.
In 2009 her work was shortlisted for the prestigious Fabbri Prize (Premio Fabbri terza edizione, Bologna). She has given several solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, among the most important of these public shows were “Pop Up Italian Show” Hubei Museum of Art, Cina (2014), “Italian Newbrow”, Civic Museum of Palazzo Volpi, Como (2012), “Arte italiana 1968-2007 Pittura” Royal Palace Milan (2007), The “Prague ‘s Biennial 4”, Karlin Hall, Praga (2009).

Giuseppe Gonella was born in Motta di Livenza (Treviso) and lives and works in Berlin. His interest in visual arts is manifested since early attending the atelier of his father Angelo, artist and master of arts in the field of mosaic and glass. In 2006 he won a competition for a scholarship and one Atelier at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. In 2008 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice.

Giuseppe Gonella’s paintings explore the rituals, the dreams and fears typical of modern humans and they take the viewer through mysterious landscapes with uncertain horizons, appearing as undefined illusions. His paintings detach from the reality we see and they transform memories in modern allegories. His research on the human condition digs deep between introspection and desire for freedom and it is in contrast with our society that, thanks to the mass media, creates icons that quickly fade away. His work evokes a sort of controlled chaos: textures, vivid colours, varying brushstrokes and overlapping photographs, they all work together, combining the abstract with the ethereal. The figures, that seem to float on the canvas, are swept up in a frenzy of colour and abstraction and appear surreal and dream-like.

His main solo exhibitions are: Praestigium/ Imago mundi, Fondazione Sandretto Rebaudengo, Turin, IT (2015); Map of New Art/ Imago mundi, Luciano Benetton Collection, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, IT (2015); Intersections, Egbert Baquè Contemporary Art, Berlin, DE (2015).

Svitlana Grebenyuk’s work moves on a plane of continual shifting and displaced meanings, references and suggestions, but characterized by a strong love for painting and for its infinite possibilities, and a formal research of great synthesis and rigour. A process that has many stages that have progressively developed over time: from a violent colourism, a sort of neoprimitivism tied intimately to the northern and eastern European tradition, to an extreme reduction of the sign, in which the black and white portraits lose their features and what remains is simply an external line. Up to the series of sacred icons, which the artist treats with a monotype technique and an increasingly pronounced rarefaction, which foreshadows the further step towards a sort of informality. In her latest series, presented exclusively at the Galleria Vik Milano, Svitlana Grebenyuk continues her work of remixing codes and references: the paintings, although apparently figurative, in fact become a pretext for a complex work on the sense of rhythm, colour and composition.

Svitlana Grebenyuk was born in Ukraine but now lives and works in Milan.

She has participated in numerous exhibitions. In 2015 she was invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennial. Among the other institutions in which she has exhibited are: Museum Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana (Cuba), Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan; Palazzo della Penna, Perugia; Palazzo Te, Mantua; the Leonardo da Vinci Science and Technology Museum, Milan; the Ansaldo Creative Workshops, Milan and Palazzo Guidobono, Tortona.

Born in 1981 in Avezzano (AQ), Italy.

In 2000 she got a high school diploma of Fashion, Design and Decor. She earned a bachelor’s degree of Television, Cinema and Multimedia Production at university of Bologna, where she lives and works as painter.

She collaborated with international film and music festivals, music labels and Italian fashion designers.

She usually works with musicians and video artists for multimedia installations.

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 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).

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

Julian Lennon has always felt that he has observed life differently, perhaps because his path through life has been so unusual. Nothing could be more apparent, as he reveals to the viewer his keen eye for composition and his gift for capturing an intimate moment. Julian seeks to depict his personal journey as an artist in the midst of unique life experiences.

Born in Liverpool, England, Julian Lennon began his artistic trajectory at a young age with an inherent gift for playing musical instruments. Those abilities would soon broaden into the cinematic and visual arts. As an observer of life in all its forms, Julian developed his personal expression through such mediums as music, documentary filmmaking, philanthropy, and now photography. ‘Timeless,’ his first photo exhibition, staged in Manhattan in September 2010, debuted Julian’s considerable talents behind the camera, as seen in photographs of U2 and his painterly landscapes. Since then, he has had multiple exhibitions throughout the world, his most recent ‘Horizon’ which reconciled photography with philanthropy, the results of a Charity: Water and White Feather Foundation initiative, bringing critically needed clean drinking water to parts of Africa. During his travels through Kenya, Ethiopia, South America and beyond, Julian captured a wide variety of images with the intention of inspiring viewers to learn about unique indigenous cultures, meanwhile raising awareness of their plights.

Empathy, notes Julian Lennon, is the bond that unites the planet. He offers, “We are all in this together, and hopefully someday, the world will realize that…photography is one way to share, learn, appreciate, and experience other cultures, which in turn allows us to empathize with other people’s lives…”

To find out more about Julian Lennon’s life and history please visit his official website.

You can also follow Julian on Instagram – click here

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 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.

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.

Born in Milan, he is an architect and artist. He participated in several institutional exhibitions promoted by important art critics, including Vittorio Sgarbi who also invited him in the 54th Venice Biennale; his works are in prestigious private and public collections in Europe and United States. Now a well-known portraitist, he began painting with models at the age of 12 in his parents’ (famous post-war artists) atelier. Since 2010 he has been painting works where landscape, imagination and bodies together speak the universal language of emotions, linked to the desire to launch oneself forward.

He is an instinctual painter with strong culture and extraordinary imagination, who reconstructs fantastic worlds in dramatic tones, populated by beings that seem to live in a dimension of eternal disturbance and anxiety. Immersed in a perennially agitated and restless nature, which always seems on the verge of exploding and returning to its original and primitive state of chaos, Monnini’s men and women live in a state of eternal amazement and profound empathy in front of the chaos and the dynamism and mysterious beauty of the natural element.

His Paintings are all metaphors of the human nature in which an almost abstract landscape, often marine, completes the action of people, trees and sometimes animals.

He uses a mixed media technique where oil colour, espresso coffee and acrylics give shape to the scene trough a gestural and instinctive painting.

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.

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).

Carla Mura began working with unusual materials from the early 2000s. It is with the discovery of the cotton thread that the artist’s work has entered a phase of full maturation. Although starting from a figurative base, the artist has almost completely deviated from it over time, “reinventing” and freezing the forms of the landscape and of our visual memory in a grid of abstract elements with intricate geometries, with compositions formed by juxtaposition in general and the juxtaposition of the different wires in particular. The forms of the world, as we know them, are reduced to geometric-volumetric structures, made of planes, lines, angles and horizons. In this sense, the work of Carla Mura basically becomes an operation of subtraction, of synthesis and an inexhaustible search for the fundamental planes of reality. However, the work of the artist does not stop, and does not reduce, to a mere operation of arithmetical-volumetric synthesis. Her poetic strength, occurs precisely through the articulation of the play of colour, on the one hand, and the tactility of the material on the other. It is here, in this ambiguity of vision, that Carla Mura stages her game of hide-and-seek with the eye of the spectator, eternally suspended between the internal rigor of the architecture of the work and the extraordinary evanescence of matter and colour.

Carla Mura was born in Cagliari in 1973. After a long period of only painting begins to realize his works using a new material from her loved the thread. He currently lives and works in Veneto. She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in museums and public institutions in Italy and abroad. Turin, Rome, Naples, Paris and Russia some places where she has exhibited.

Diverse paintings: oil, acrylic, vinyl, on mud and wood, including bronze and mud techniques

Bio ~ Carlos Musso was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1954. Painter, installation and graphic artist, as well as set designer, Musso has carried out numerous individual and collective exhibitions of his work. He has worked as a teacher in prestigious national institutions.  In 2002, he received the Figari award for his professional career.

Anna Muzi’s pictorial work is divided between painting and collage, with variations from time to time, but with great coherence from a stylistic and conceptual point of view. In her still life and domestic interiors, the artist works mainly on the study of composition and chromatic combinations, with a seemingly casual rational that seems to echo the first “assemblages” of Dadaist ancestry and the Duchampian’s objets trouvés. The artist uses a similar process when works with collage. The figures and shapes appear almost like simple colours and geometries, which Anna Muzi approaches and overlaps one on another, de-contextualising them from each of their functions and pre-established order. Even in portraiture, the painter sets the characters against domestic backgrounds, where libraries and decorative objects can be glimpsed.

In a continuous game of cross-references between past and present, personal memories and quotations, Anna Muzi’s paintings represent a refined, rigorous and essential style of painting, where every chromatic and compositional element seems to have a formal logic that transcends the meaning of pure representation.

Anna Muzi was born in Rome in 1962 and lives and works in Milan.

She attended the Academy of Fashion and Costume in Rome and Central St. Martins School of Arts in London. She held her first personal exhibition at the Antonia Jannone Gallery in Milan in 1998. Her works have been exhibited, with  other artists, at the Space for Contemporary Art in Lugano, at the Stattbad Gallery in Berlin and at the National Museum of Bellas Artes, La Havana (Cuba).

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.

Matteo Negri is mainly a sculptor, as well as a complete artist who works with very different techniques and supports. His artistic research focuses on the use of non-traditional materials for artistic practice, which the artist works eclectically, moving from stone to ceramic to resin, using strong and decisive colours as a tool of strong expressiveness. After a brief research on abandoned injection, the artist makes himself known with a series of sculptures that take the form of glazed ceramic underwater mines, with typically pop colours that make them extremely bright. Later the artist creates a new cycle of works that imitates the shapes of the famous “Lego” bricks, as an example and metaphor of architectural construction, combining the artist’s tendency to a great formal and conceptual rigour with the joyfulness and lightness coming from the world of children. The artist’s most recent work, exhibited in Galleria Vik Milano, focuses on the attempt to create a perceptive and visual disorientation in those who approach the work, through the creation of plastic and two-dimensional works with translucent surfaces, thus reworking the structural codes of abstractionism in terms of content and those between sculpture and painting in terms of form processing.
“My artistic practice is aimed to analyze the perceptive role of the surface and the color, both in the field of sculpture and of artworks of a two-dimensional nature. In particular I deeply analyzed geometrical aspect, also to the phenomenon of chromatic variability and mirror reflection, which I used as alienating devices capable of altering the ordinary perception of volumes and planes. Thanks to this mode, the work stops being a fixed and absolute form, since it kinetically activates a relationship with the context and with the same observer who, in some way, contaminate it in a game of continuous visual reflex. The materials that I love most are aluminum, colored paper, glass and iridescent films that allow, with their magical charm, to go beyond a static and monolithic vision of the usual art-work.

Matteo Negri was born in S. Donato Milanese (MI) in 1982. He currently lives and works in Milan. Graduated in sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, since 2003 the artist has worked with numerous art galleries in Italy and abroad (including Paris, London, Berlin and Belgium), creating numerous installations in art galleries, public and private spaces and art fairs. Among the main exhibitions in Italy are those held at the MAC Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Lissone, the Bilotti Museum of Villa Borghese in Rome, Casa Testori in Novate Milanese (Mi), Palazzo Morelli in Todi and MACRO Testaccio in Rome.

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 focuses his pictorial work on visions that are often dramatic, with generally dark tones, but with sudden flashes of bright and violent colour, which seem to come from the great Fifteenth Century pictorial tradition, with particular reference to Flemish painting, from Bosch to Bruegel. His images seem to sink in his hands, to the bowels, the soul and into the heart of the mystery. In his paintings different and apparently unrelated elements appear: macabre dances, temporal journeys, crossings of fairy lakes in the company of never seen birds, flying fish, fiery winds, self-combusting trees and men, dreams, mirages, hallucinations and metamorphoses. A mad and perfectly coherent remixing of traditions, mysteries, ancient practices and secret past liturgies, which seem to conceal an unresolved enigma, of which it is impossible to understand the final meaning, but which leaves the viewer speechless with astonishment and wonder.

Sergio Padovani was born in Modena in 1972, where he still lives. For several years a musician working in experimentation and research, since 2006 he has worked mainly on painting. He has won several art awards, including the Arte Laguna Prize, the Wannabee Award and the Yicca Prize. He was a finalist for the Celeste Prize, the Combat Prize and the Arte Prize. His works are in important collections both in Italy and in Europe. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in galleries and public institutions. These include participation at the 54th Venice Biennial at the Italian Pavilion and the inauguration exhibition of The Bank Collection in Bassano del Grappa.

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’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 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 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.

Franca Pisani travels in primordial memories, where the present includes roots and rebirth, where the past suggests the limit of a continuous evolution.

Gianluca Marziani

A leading representative of the stylistic renewal of the 1970s, Franca Pisani has for many years focused her research on the symbolic force of the sign and on the inner meaning of pictorial gestures. Indeed, since the early 2000s, the artist has been making her sign research increasingly profound and formally synthetic. The sign becomes an element of passive rebellion against an art that is weighed down by the historical superstructures it carries. Therefore Pisani is searching a sign that is both a manual trace and a pure, elementary creative act, in order to arrive today at the definition of that absolute, infinite sign, a symbol of a fluid present without fixed references that the critic Gianluca Marziani has defined as “archaeo-future” and which the artist documents through her complex work. Archaeology, the traces of memory on the present, but also ethics, the feminine, politics, enter in Franca Pisani’s work through the most varied themes, always characterised by an original and unmistakable stylistic approach. The investigation into the forms of the world takes place through the most varied media: from painting to sculpture and installation. The works create the image of an artist with an inexhaustible creativity through, where the energy of a formally free sign with a primordial force becomes the symbol of vitality and persistence of memory in the life of man.

Franca Pisani was born in Grosseto in 1956 into a family of artists. Since her first experiments in the 1970s, which led her to exhibit in important museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the artist has developed her pictorial language, gaining awards in the highest institutions of international art: from the Venice Biennale to the Uffizi in Florence and public museums in Europe and abroad. Some of the museums that hosted her works are: the Museo del Mare (Muma) in Genoa, the Hamburgher Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Marino Marini Museum in Florence, Palazzo S.Elia in Palermo, the Macro Testaccio in Rome, the Fortezza da Basso in Florence and Castel dell’Ovo in Naples.

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 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 was born in 1969. He is an Italian street artist who begins his adventure in the world of Hip Hop culture and writing at the age of 15. He has two historical crews from the Italian graffiti scene, the MCAs in the 80s and the TDKs in the 90s.

He is among the first Italian writers to use an autonomous and cultured language compared to the classic style of American “bombing”. After graduating in design, he understands the need to evolve his expressive language and he leaves any reference to figuration and begins building his own symbolic universe of an abstract nature.

He is one of the first Italian writers to develop his own peculiar language, in which the American school lettering is transformed according tradition of industrial design as the historical European avant-gardes and the geometric abstraction of the Fifties and Sixties. In his complex narrative universes, the visual memory of cartoons and Japanese anime is mixed with the lines of the radical design of the Sixties and Seventies and references to advertising graphics, the world of consumerism and video games, and the widespread pop culture.

In 2007 he took part at the PAC in Milan at the group exhibition “Street Art Sweet Art” (the first that an Italian museum dedicated to the phenomenon of writing and street art), two sculptures in which the letters of his name and his crew are transformed into true three-dimensional elements. In 2008 he took part at “Scala Mercalli” exhibition in Rome, in the the Music Auditorium. He has participated in street art festivals and exhibitions throughout Europe.

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 choses an anti-iconic painting style, albeit with symbolic elements that return as mathematical symbols hidden within a geometric structure. Hearts, small crosses, elementary forms are constantly repeated as if to form a symbolic grid of the world. Above all, a very ancient technique, that of the shibori, in vogue around the Edo era, which consists in tying or manipulating the fabric and immersing it in a dye bath that creates a sort of abstract fantasy.

That of Sakurai appears as a strongly stylized and particularly rich analysis of the subtle structures from which reality is woven. His paintings with their strong tones are enlivened by a current of pop energy in a complex interplay of strongly contrasted and vivid, acid colours, magically harmonized with each other, increasing their power of alienation and symbolic strength.

Sakurai’s is an act of symbolic re-ordering of the world through a process of de-contextualization of images and symbols from their original reference, bringing nature and the artificial world closer together.

Shinya Sakurai was born in Hiroshima in 1981 and lives in Turin since many years. His paintings have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and Japan. Among the most recent exhibitions are: Artmark Gallery in Vienna (Austria), the Heis Gallery in Fukuoka (Japan), the Galerie Lattemann in Darmstadt (Germany), the Paris Gallery in Yokohama (Japan), the Marco Cappello Gallery in Turin (Italy),the Italian Cultural Institute in Osaka (Japan), the Maeda Hiromi Art Gallery in Kyoto (Japan), the San Domenico Foundation in Crema (Italy), the Caruso Gallery in Milazzo and Galleria Eidos Contemporary Images in Asti (Italy).

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.

Born in 1934 in Homs, Libya, he dies in 1998 in Rome. Mario Schifano is considered one of the most significant and eminent artists of Italian postmodernism, he is even mentioned as the father of the Italian Pop Art. He was a painter but also a film maker and musician, he designed CD covers for many artists, such as the Velvet Underground. He likes to experiment with new languages.

Most of his works from the 1960s have anticipated many recurring themes of American Pop Art, such as the series of works dedicated to advertisement brands (Coca-Cola, Esso, etc). Schifano liked working with new pictorial techniques and was among the first to use the television and the computer in order to create works of art. In Paesaggi TV, images are taken from the television screen and then reproduced in his paintings.

Work on media and multimedia characterized his last production. He died in Rome in 1998.

In 2008 the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome dedicated him a major posthumous retrospective.

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.

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.

Giorgio Tentolini has built his artistic research on the extrapolation of photographic images (faces of women, silhouettes of ancient Greek or Roman sculptures, architecture), then reworked through unconventional media, such as wire mesh, Plexiglas or paper. He creates highly iconic, fluid and mysterious images, which seem to be caught in constant mutation and movement under our gaze. Light, an essential component of his work, has always marked and reassembled the various elements of the image, reconstructing it in a complex, ideal, stratified and multiform perceptive unit, which rekindles in us the sensation of accessing a buried or removed area of our own deep memory. Giorgio Tentolini’s research is, in fact, a perfect metaphor of the relationship between time, image and memory. The artist’s rarefied atmospheric representations seem to express the impalpable density of memories that have become entangled in our retina, and then brought back to light through a work of reworking that blends movement and static in a single material and virtual, artificial and natural perceptual field. The mysterious perceptive game of his works recalls the dynamism of kinetic art, without renouncing the seductive power of representation.

Giorgio Tentolini was born in Casalmaggiore (Cr) in 1978. His analytical approach to the perception of the photographic image derives from his training in the graphic arts, design and communication. Winner of the Rigamonti, Nocivelli, Paratissima and Arteam Cup Awards , the artist has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

For several years now, Elena Trailina has been using the gold leaf puncturing technique. She has resumed, consciously and thoughtfully, a practice that belonged to the Russian tradition of religious iconography: the decoration of the gold leaf obtained through the ancient “punching” technique used to create the halos of saints and the golden background of their icons. The work of Elena was born out of a reflection on the concept of iconography, a religious image that goes beyond the relationship of realism and represented subject. In her work the artist borrows the images of famous art history masterpieces and depicts them as golden silhouettes. She takes her cue directly from the production of the traditional Byzantine and Italian ‘300 icons. She literally overturns both the concept and the form, developing this technique using new and unique copyrighted knowledge. She empties them of their subject, technique, historical context and intrinsic artistic value, emphasizing the role of the abstract icon, which transcends the work itself while, at the same time, obeying the basic rules of landscape representation. Trailina also references the most significant architectural monuments of the most famous cities in the world. In this traditional and irreverent way, Elena presents her personal concept of myth as a contemporary iconography that celebrates itself through the representation of its silhouette. 

Elena Trailina was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. She lives and works between Milan, Moscow and the Alps. Elena has participated in numerous exhibitions around the world: Italy, France, Great Britain, Russia, Finland and India. She works with different galleries in Switzerland, Italy and Russia. She has also participated in the 54th Venice Biennial. She is also a member of the International Federation of Russian Artists.

Andrea Zucchi’s work is punctuated by reflections on the deepest meaning of making art, and specifically on the use of drawing and painting in relationship with the images from our memory, our history of art or our current events. In the project for Galleria Vik Milano, Zucchi uses the technique of ballpoint pen drawing, printed on a large scale, representing subjects taken from old Nineteenth Century photographs that almost always represent oriental scenes, from Japan to India and Egypt. An idea of ​nostalgic and melancholic orientalism acts as a trait-d’union, bringing back into vogue a world that no longer exists and that recalls the scenes painted by Ingres, Delacroix, Gauguin, Matisse.

His finely defined drawings in blue ballpoint pen evoke the ancient engravings and a fast and nervous stroke that makes them very modern. The images themselves, intentionally taken from photographs of the Nineteenth Century, on one hand recall a nostalgic and forgotten world, and on the other a reworking, in an original way, the theme of copying so present in the practices of conceptual artists of the last decades.

An embracing blues, between past and present, in warm shades of blue and ivory.

Andrea Zucchi was born in 1964 in Milan, where he lives and works.

Form and abstraction are the two poles between which Andrea Zucchi’s search has always oscillated. In his work, the Milanese artist searches for the impossible unity among those that, since the early 20th century, have become the cardinal points of painting: iconic and aniconic.

His works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennial and Rome Quadrennial, as well as different institutional museums in Italy and abroad. Sui Generis at the Pac, Milan (2000), Arte italiana, 1968-2007. Pittura, at the Royal Palace, Milan (2007), Percorsi riscoperti dell’arte italiana at MART of Trento (2011) and Pop up Italian show at the Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan, China (2014).

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.