This Saturday June 11 Bologna-based MAGMA gallery will be presenting ABSTRACT NOW! a group exhibition featuring works by Fabio Petani, Nelio and Heiko Zahlmann.

ABSTRACT NOW! expresses the desire of the gallery to offer a valuable snapshot of the contemporary Urban Abstract Art, addressing the featured artists and the public with the imperative of an immediate abstraction, reducing what is around us to reach new semantic forms.
The exhibition aims to be a milestone able to give the viewer the chance to have a look at the evolution of non-figurative contemporary urban art over the last years.

It focuses on the experimental transformation of shapes and surfaces that make up the urban landscape, from which the three artists draw their inspiration from; Fabio Petani with his refined balance between organic forms and geometry, Nelio through a dense texture of colour fields that he uses to compose his name, and Heiko Zahlmann, with a long and vaunted past as a graffiti writer, evolves his style in three-dimensional works, in which painting, drawing and architecture interact with one another.

ABSTRACT NOW! open on Saturday June 11 and will be on view through July 30 2016 at the gallery located on Via Santo Stefano n. 164, 40125 Bologna, Italy.


Fabio Petani was born in Pinerolo in 1987. Throughout his rich artistic career, he has experimented, not only on the numerous commissioned murals, even on paper, canvas and alternative media. In this exhibition, some works on wood will be shown to the public for the first time, a material that enhances the subtle yet strong relationship between abstraction, nature, and chemistry that make him easily recognizable.





Heiko Zahlmann was born in Hamburg in 1973. For over twenty years, he has been active in urban areas around the world and his works have been exhibited mainly in major institutions like the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg and numerous international galleries. Among his best-known public works is the giant 100-ton concrete installation in the heart of the modern Hamburg.

Heiko Zahlmann-Untitled 2012-53x80x6cm Heiko Zahlmann-Untitled 2014_100x100x6cm

Nelio, who was born in 1982 in France, has developed a unique artistic approach that combines symbols, letters, landscapes, and geometric shapes. Abstract experimentation brought forward by the artist creates imaginary shapes, bright colours, and geometric elements. Combining these features, the artist is able to generate dense and complicated textures, continuous motion made of perceptual games, and flat and three-dimensional elements in which the viewer finds himself caught in a personal abstraction of form.





Author: Fran

Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.