This Friday May 4th is the opening of The Twilight Zone, an exciting exhibition at Burning Giraffe Gallery in Turin, Italy curated by Alessandra Ioalé, counting with the participation of international renowned artists like Francesco Barbieri, Chazme, Andrea Chiesi, Etnik, Marcantonio Lunardi, Luca Lupi, Fabio Pradarelli, Sepe.
The exhibition consists of a series of paintings, photographs and sculptural works that unveil an interesting reading of today’s realist movement by focusing on the urban landscape and daily life. In this way, they bring new life into an otherwise traditional movement, a movement that not only seems to experience a new renaissance, but also regain autonomy in a constantly developing contemporary art scene.
“In the last twenty years there is a new group of artists which return to represent urban daily life answering to that duty of chronicle of the contemporary with a quality and variety of original, unpublished, personal and expressive solutions. For many contemporary artists, the city returns to be a perfect subject for their research through which reflecting (even with polemic voices) on the crisis that has invested in the last twenty years and contaminated the form of the city. New artists who paint the decadent charm of the contemporary outskirts and documenting urban communities that live there describing typical everyday situations.” (Excerpt from Alessandra Ioalè’s critique “The Twilight Zone. Tales from the edge of town”).
The Twilight Zone opens on May 4th and runs through June 2nd at the gallery located on Via Eusebio Bava 8/A, 10124, Turin, Italy.
About the participant artists
Francesco Barbieri (born in 1976 in Pisa, Italy). Is an internationally recognized artist working in contemporary post-graffitism. With his work on canvas he has explored various topics borrowed from graffiti folklore. His production focuses on the creation of urban landscapes where the train and the railroad are often central elements. In his works he explores “the margins” of urban life, representing those no-man lands which one can find at the geographical and social borders of the city. With his unique visual language, Barbieri aims at conveying those same feelings that he experienced in the streets and that he has been exploring for years. Travelling has become one of the essential elements of his art: he visited several times, among others, Berlin and Stockholm in Europe, New York and S. Francisco in America, Beijing and Nanjing in China, with the desire to discover the hidden lives of modern metropolises. www.franc
Daniel Kalinski aka CHAZME (born in 1980 in Laufen, Switzerland). Is a Polish painter, illustrator and street artist. In 2008, He graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Technology in Warsaw. Chazme often constructs urbanised structures out of defined, geometrical areas. These dystopian compositions are comments and critiques on urban planning and architecture, which the passers-by are invited to decipher, reflect and maybe even oppose. On a visual level, they are most always compositionally perfectly balanced and reflect the pattern of our modern skyscraper architecture. The artist’s studio work ranges from canvas to collage. Even though his studio work is more figurative, it still emits the strong assemblage aesthetic which is unique to his work. Chazme’s street art pieces can be seen on the walls of many metropolises such as Prague, Berlin, Glasgow, among many others. Lives and works in Warsaw. http://chazme.org/
Andrea Chiesi (born in 1966 in Modena, Italy). He lives and works in San Pancrazio (Modena). Self-taught, Andrea Chiesi trained in the counter-culture of early 80’s punk and independent music. He began drawing for independent fanzines and making exhibitions in social centres. The works from this period were created using black and violet inks on paper. The characters, figures and spaces represented were connected to the particular cultural environment he used to attend. Later he has started a research about contemporary landscapes, time and memory using a strict and careful oil painting that sometimes enhances industrial subjects or urban spaces, but others creates strong black and white contrasts thanks to a fast transition from darkness to a half-light situation. The use of ink in drawings and the oil painting technique are carried on simultaneously and it helps to pay attention to the differences between the two worlds: a shifting and fluent universe the first, a metaphysical and timeless one the latter. www.andreachiesi.it
Etnik (born in 1972 in Stocholm, Sweden). Active since the early ’90 in the writing scene, searching new ways to push the limit of the classical graffiti to a high level painting big murals with concept and organizing events to connect the best european artists. From the 2001 his way to paint start to evolve to geometrical and architectural forms, still working on the lettering with a mixture of urban landscapes. This way to rappresent the CITY and criticize it and painting the urban volumes as an abstract composition, is the way to work on different media from painting, to sculpture and installation. Now work in his studio in Turin, traveling a lot for mural paintings and gallery shows. www.etnikproduction.com
Marcantonio Lunardi (born in 1968 in Lucca, Italy). Graduated in documentarist direction, since 2001 Lunardi has dealt with the social and political documentation working on installations, documentaries and video-art works. After the master at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence with Michael Glawogger, Sergei Dvortsevoy, Thomas Heise and Andrés Di Tella he engaged in a path in the field of the motion pictures experimenting with a language bordering with the cinema of reality and the video art. His works have been put on display in famous international institutes such as: the National Art Center in Tokyo, the Galeri Nasional Indonesia in Jakarta, the Fondazione Centro Studi Ragghianti in Lucca, the Video Tage Center in Hong Kong, the Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem, the Videoart Yearbook of the Dipartimento di arti visive (Department of Visual Art) at the University of Bologna. Lunardi was also a guest at many festivals of experimental cinema and of video art such as: the Festival Internacional de Cine y Video Experimental in Bilbao, the N Minutes Video Art Festival in Shanghai, the Cairo Video Festival in Cairo, the Festival Invideo in Milan, the Video Art & Experimental Film Festival – Tribeca Cinemas in New York. He lives and work in Bagni di Lucca (Lucca, Italy). www.marcantonio.eu
Luca Lupi (born in 1970 in Pontedera, Pisa, Italy). With the photographic project “Landscape”, whose places and subjects are all different: walls, trees, cities, woods, beaches, industrial areas, but connected by the same height of the horizon and from the same frontal point of view, the artist reflects on the complex and continuous transformations of places and on the relationship between the built and the natural that gives shape to our contemporary world. With this project, in 2016 he won the first prize in the Italy in a frame contest – the Italian Community at the Milan Triennale. Lives and works in Fucecchio, Florence (Italy) www.lucalupi.it
Fabio Pradarelli (born in 1955 in Pesaro, Italy). Studied architecture at the University of Florence, at the same time attending the Faculty of Contemporary History of the University of Oregon, Eugene Oregon U.S. Graduated with a thesis in Composition in 1983 in Florence, he worked for about two years in a professional studio in Pesaro, before moving on to the profession with a structure of his own. He currently practices as an architect with a studio in Pesaro. At the same time as professional activity he has also carried out an intense activity in the visual arts sector, with numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. www.fabiopradarelli.it
Michał ‘SEPE’ Wręga (born in 1982 in Warsaw, Poland). Since 1996 related to graffiti and than street art scene in Poland. Graduated graphic design on Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź in 2009. Lives and works in Warsaw as a freelance graphic designer, painter and illustrator. Raised on traditional graffiti movement, rooted in book illustration and then by the studies interested in graphic and poster design, Sepe is searching for his individual art language mixing those three paths on paper, canvas and walls as well. www.sepeusz.com
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.
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