Invernomuto Pinksummer

Invernomuto, Pinksummer at Artissima 2017

Simone Bertuzzi (b. 1983) and Simone Trabucchi (b. 1982) have been collaborating as Invernomuto since 2003. Although they primarily work in moving image and sound, Invernomuto also integrate sculpture, publishing, and performance in their practice.
Recent solo exhibitions include Africa Addio, pinksummer, Genoa (2015), MALÙ, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Toronto (2015), Artspeak, Vancouver(2015), Wondo Genet, AuditoriumArte, Rome (2015), Anabasis Articulata, Triennale di Milano, Milan (2014), Marsèlleria, Milan (2014), Negus– Far Eye, Museion, Bozen (2014), I-Ration, ar/ge kunst, Bozen (2014), The Celestial Path, GAMeC, Bergamo (2013) and Simone, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Ferrara (2011).
Group shows and festivals (selection): Nero su Bianco, American Academy in Rome, Rome (2015), La Scrittura degli Echi, MAXXI, Rome (2015), Glitch. Interferenze tra arte e cinema in Italia, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2014), Black Star Film Festival, Philadelphia (2014), Così Accade, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2014), Terre Vulnerabili, Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2011) and Netmage 09, Bologna (2009).
In 2013 Invernomuto was a finalist in the 9th Edition of the Furla Art Award and won the first edition of the MERU ART*SCIENCE Award. In 2014 they obtain a funding from MiBAC to conclude Negus, their first fulllengthfilm due to be released at the beginning of 2016; the film has also been selected for Berlinale Talents (Berlin), in 2014. In 2015 they shoot a documentary about Picò culture in Northern Colombia, commissioned by PlusDesign gallery.
Bertuzzi and Trabucchi also pursue individual practices in the field of music, performing under the names Palm Wine and Dracula Lewis respectively.
They live and work in Milan and Vernasca.

David Douard Chantal Crousel

David Douard, W’, 2017, Galerie Chantal Crousel

David Douard is an artist based in Aubervilliers, France. This year, his work was on show at Union Pacific, London, UK, and his solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France, opened in September. His work is included in the group show ‘Co-Workers. Le réseau comme artiste’ (Co-Workers. The Net as Artist) at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 9 October to 31 January 2016.

Haim Steinbach Vistamare

Haim Steinbach, Ilmareapparivatuttobianco, 2017, Vistamare

Haim Steinbach was born in 1944 in Rehovot, Israel. He moved with his family to New York in 1957 and became an American citizen in 1962. He studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and spent a year at the Université d’Aix in Marseille. After completing a BFA in 1968, Steinbach earned an MFA at Yale University in 1973. Steinbach’s art has been associated with Simulationism and Neo-Geo for its incorporation of consumer items and its precise composition. In addition, his practice of appropriating objects has led many critics to draw connections between his work and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Steinbach’s art, however, not only relates to the selection and presentation of objects but also explores contemporary consumer culture and our psychic attachments to things. His earlier shelf arrangements included handmade shelves and objects borrowed from friends or found at flea markets. In 1983–84, he introduced a standardized shelf: wedge-shaped, triangular in profile, and made of plywood with various plastic-laminate finishes. He also began to emphasize store-bought objects about this time. In the 1980s, he photographed many of these works on display in the houses of relatives and friends, years later exhibiting the black-and-white images.

Steinbach’s first solo museum exhibition was held at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux (1988). Important exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (with Ettore Spalletti, 1993), Castello di Rivoli, Italy (1995 and 2004), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (1997–98), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2000), and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2005). For Documenta 9 (1992), Steinbach borrowed and displayed a selection of the exhibition curator’s possessions. His art has also been included in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1997, and 2001) and numerous other international exhibitions. Steinbach has taught at Middlebury College in Vermont, Cornell University in Ithaca, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the University of California in San Diego, among other schools. He lives and works in Brooklyn and San Diego.

For Vistamare, the artist focuses on the mutability of the meanings of the object, with special reference to form and color, and in particular to the ways in which architecture itself is an object for its nature, form and size. The object is an architecture: it occupies space in the same way as the interior or exterior of an architectural volume. Color is perceived through our senses, emotions, and words. Steinbach’s wall paintings involve architecture: a wall as a significant part of the architecture. The artwork, a painted wall, duplicates the wall and improves our perception of its spatial layout. In Vistamare, Steinbach presents two wall paintings based on Gabriele D’Annunzio’s “Trionfo della Morte” by Gabriele D’Annunzio: “da soli, le vele rosse, superbe come se fossero di porpora, spezzarono la luce diffusa”una nebbia, Leggermente tinto di violetta, accarezzò le coste lontane”

Chantal Joffe Monica De Cardenas

Chantal Joffe, Esme on the Beach, 2016, Monica De Cardenas

Chantal Joffe is known for her portraits, painted in a fluid, smooth style, in which she is able to capture the emotions, weaknesses and vitality of human existence. Her subjects are often female: girls, adolescents and women seen in different moments of life. The artist depicts them with a gaze that is halfway between the immediacy of a snapshot and a situation of emphatic distortion. These studies on the human condition express no judgments, but appear one after the other with great energy and engagement, also thanks to the bold rejection of any formal order. The psychological intensity of the figures makes our very opinion ambiguous, disturbing and gratifying us at the same time.

With influences ranging from Piero della Francesca to Edgar Degas and from Francis Bacon to Alex Katz, Joffe has based her work on a direct and intimate observational relationship between the painter and her sitter. Mostly her subjects are family members and personal friends, sometimes images from historical figures or the mass media. She is also engaged in a series of candid, often searing self-portraits and tender double portraits with her daughter Esme. Whatever their origin, her subjects have the intensity and psychological richness of characters, like instants captured from the lives of literary heroines. Within this subject area, Joffe experiments widely with form, color, texture and approach. The paintings swing between the poles of forethought and improvisation, as flurries of brushstrokes repeatedly clash and fuse across the canvas’s arena of action. Although drawing is important to her, she never delineates her forms, but rather allows color and shape to merge as a cumulation of her imaginative process.

Gina Folly Ermes Ermes

Gina Folly at Ermes Ermes, Artissima 2017

Gina Folly is a Basel-based Swiss artist deeply interested in the social phenomena of our growing wellness culture. With the use of drawings, photography, installation and sculpture, she adapts and transforms the objects and the symbols of this culture. Plants and animals as well as sounds and scents are often used within her artistic work. While us humans in a globalized world are constantly trying to be more productive, we on the other hand try to spend more time in nature or in order to save time and money at least to surround ourselves with it. The green lifestyle boom is critically highlighted in Folly’s work, where she negotiates the relationship between inside and outside, private and public space, both from an architectural and a social point of view.

Kate Gottgens Smac

Kate Gottgens, Court Shoes, 2017, Smac 

Kate Gottgens was born in Durban in 1965 and currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. She graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, in 1987. She presented her first solo exhibition in 1993 and subsequent solo shows include, most recently Famine at SMAC Gallery in Johannesburg, Merry Hell and the Dreambody (2010); Asleep Inside You (2009); and Little Deaths (2007).

In 2013, SMAC Gallery presented Malice Afore-thought, her first solo exhibition with the gallery, in Cape Town. This was followed by her international debut, Savage Nature at Espacio Liquido in Gijon, Spain in 2014. Gottgens has exhibited in numerous group shows locally and abroad since 1988, most notably; the 8th New Delhi Triennale (1994) and Scurvy at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town (1995).

SMAC Gallery presented Gottgens’ work at MiArt in Milan, Italy (2014) and other international fairs include SCOPE FAIR in Miami Beach, USA (2014). Following Gottgens’ inclusion as the only South African selected for Thames and Hudson’s publication, 100 Painters of Tomorrow (2014), her work was exhibited at One Art Space in New York, USA as part of the exhibition to launch the publication. In 2015, SMAC Gallery published Kate Gottgens // Paintings 2007 – 2015 to coincide with her review exhibition Infinite Loop in Stellenbosch, South Africa. That same year, she also presented a solo show; The Rising Sea at NUNC Contemporary-Antwerp in Antwerp, Belgium. Gottgens’ work is currently on show in The Vault of the new Silo Hotel at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa – she is the first artist to exhibit in this space.

Tomaso de Luca Monitor

Tomaso De Luca, Silver – tongued, 2017, Monitor

Tomaso De Luca born in 1988, he lives and works in Rome and New York. He works in drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and video. He graduated from NABA in Milan with a BA Painting and Visual Art. De Luca has widely shown in galleries and institutions in Italy, Brazil, Korea, and New York. He is currently working on a new zine called MODERNISSIMO that will compliment his solo show at Monitor Gallery in Rome.

De Luca visual language is largely focused on modernity and underground culture. He renders art history subjects through new lenses of identity, gender and sexuality. Anchoring his thoughts in Art History from Classicism to Post-Modernity, he infuses and revisits subjects and techniques with contemporary perspectives provoking an irony and detournement of once deemed sacred viewpoints. DeLuca’s work is grounded in the complexity of his interests, challenging the viewer with new ways of seeing.

Jaqueline De Jong Dürst Britt & Mayhew

Jaqueline De Jong, QuasyModo and Queen Kong, 1981, Dürst Britt & Mayhew

Jacqueline de Jong was born in 1939, in the Dutch town of Hengelo, to liberal, contemporary art-collecting Jewish industrialists. In 1942, she and her mother fled to her mother’s native Switzerland, where they stayed out the war in Zurich; one of the artist’s earliest memories is being given chocolate by Salvation Army volunteers. When they returned to Amsterdam in 1946, De Jong had to learn to speak Dutch again. De Jong’s career has been characterized by border crossings-physically, ideologically and aesthetically.

In 1959 she became involved with Danish artist Asger Jorn. Through him she was introduced to Internationale Situationniste and became a member in 1960. De Jong had become acquainted with the artist Constant and other Dutch members of the I.S. – Armando and the architect Har Oudejans – while working for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. After the Dutch section got expelled (because of constructing a church) Debord asked Jacqueline in a in  letter june 1960 (“La Hollande set ‘a vous”) to become the Dutch section on her own.

After Jacqueline was excluded of the SI in 1962 she went on to publish the first issue of The Situationist Times, an international multi-cultural revue mainly based on visual material accompanied by texts by artists, architects, scientists, poets etc.

Dana Lok Clima

Dana Lok, Assume (Say), 2017, Clima

Dana Lok was born in 1988 in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and is a current resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio program in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2015 and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 2011. Recent exhibitions:  The Set of All Sets, solo exhibition, CHEWDAY’S, London;  A night out of town, Clima, Milan;  In Place Of, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York;  The Crack Up, Room East Gallery, New York;  Floating Point, Judith Charles Gallery, New York and The Columbia MFA Thesis Exhibition, Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York. Lok was included in New American Paintings, Northeast Issue #128, curated by Laura Phipps. Dana Lok’s paintings make an analogy between a painting and a theater set—both are visual constructions meant for viewing from a particular perspective at a particular time. These paintings provide a peek at the stage from the side, or a view of the stage before the production has started. Through this theatrical analogy, the paintings present language, representation, and knowledge as miraculous, performative activities that require the framework of a stage, not unlike tricks in a magic show.

Will Benedict Balice Hertling

Will Benedict, 13th Doctor, 2017, Balice Hertling

Will Benedict, born 1978, Los Angeles, he lives and works in Vienna. He studied at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Bergen Kunsthall and at Castillo Corrales (Paris). Recent exhibitions include Halle für Kunst (Lüneburg, 2013) and Förderverein für Aktuelle Kunst (Münster, 2009) with Sara Deraedt. Since 2008 he runs the exhibition space Pro Choice with Lucie Stahl, a nonprofit space based in Vienna.