ARTISSIMA 2014 | OUR FAVOURITES FROM THE ITALIAN FAIR

From 7th until 9th November, Torino’s international contemporary art fair opens to the public for its twenty-first edition, at the Oval, Lingotto Fiere. As a high-profile event, the fair showcases the finest works from visual arts, gathering professionals and art enthusiasts on a focus for Torino’s art scene. With this celebrated fair, Ultra Vie presents its favourite artworks this year’s Artissima.

 

Christiane Löhr

Using natural elements, Christiane Löhr creates installations to attract silent contemplation and marvel. The artwork isolates the materials from its natural cycle, distills them by constructing sculptures that hold balance in the elements themselves.

 

Paulo Bruscky

Paulo Bruscky’s enveolpe series are a depiction of visual poetry, as postal art becomes a platform of exchanging ideas insights between artists. As the mail becomes the artistic proactive, the elements of postcards, stamps, and others becomes a symbolic reproduction that defines the mail itself, transforming into an act of performance and recording actions.

 

Agnese Purgatorio

Working in photography, video, installation, as well as performance, Italian artist Agnese Purgatorio revolves her work in a political approach. Through a poetic manner, Purgatorio’s intention is to give a ‘visible’ body to continuity, towards the reversibility of the condition of clandestine refugees.

 

Noga Shtainer

Noga Shtainer’s research took her to an investigation of orphans and homes for special children in Ukraine, and find their tragic fates. As one of the countries facing global threats and challenges, the everyday life with stories of pain and misery are reflected through the artist’s empathy.

 

Tetsumi Kudo

Tetsumi Kudo was one of the most innovative Japanese artists in his unique exploration of the human drive of consumerism and the critical issues in art and politics. Kudo’s works focusing on boxes is his artistic approach in conveying the definition of boxes for different sense – a collective keeper of the tangible and intangible or as a place of hide and isolation. Yet, Kudo concludes, “However, my idea may be Oriental.”

 

G.R.A.M.

The group G.R.A.M. photograph series presents the paradoxical image of politicians in the parliament. With actual photographs taken across the globe, including in Kiev, Seoul and Taipei, the images depict the contradicting representation of the role of politicians.

 

Fausto Gilberti

Fausto Gilberti presents his small, monochrome characters with their wondered-expression while imitating recognisable figures and occurrences. Gilberti’s works take the irony from these popular culture events, and paradoxically interprets them into his work details as essential aspects of the concept.

 

Hell’O Monsters

Belgian artists Jérôme Meynen, François Dieltiens and Antoine Detaille, group together as Hell’O Monsters, combining each of their styles into imaginary scenarios into their artworks. These visual narratives filled with hybrid characters such as uniquely formed human beings and mutant animals. Though gruesome yet tender, these figures display a narrative that impersonates the human laws of through metaphysical reflections and nonsense.

 

Joan Jonas

New York artist Joan Jonas is known to be a pioneer in video and performance art. As one of the most important female artists today, Jonas has developed her art practice in observing the ways of seeing, through rhythms of ritual and authority of objects and gestures. Since the late 1960s, Jonas finds a visual language with the mediums of video as a performative space, creating alter egos and theatrical personas for her own non-linear narrative.

 

John Wood and Paul Harrison

John Wood and Paul Harrison question the notion of human’s positive roles in the world by exploiting physical and psychological parameters through constructed video series works. Several of Wood and Harrison’s works are within collections including in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

 

Sigalit Landau

Sigalit Landau’s artistic approach are known to be works of a bridge-maker. Landau finds art as a way to connect between past to the future, the private with the collective, and forming grand, deep narratives and mythologies for the objects discovered. Landau’s selected works are in public collections including in Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Magasin 3 in Stockholm, as well as Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

 

Alex Mirutziu

Alex Mirutziu’s artistic approach in his performance art forms a new concept of work: the object co-exists in the environment while being the environment itself. With Mirutziu’s provocative and intense works, the artist attempts to question the monumentality of a paper or the idea of drawing with the fact of mind in finding a new architecture of the object.