Artefiera 2024

Athanasios Argianas (Athens, 1976) lives and works between Athens and London.
Rooted primarily in sculpture, and spanning painting, text, performance and music, his artistic practice is open, interdisciplinary and deeply influenced by a background in music.

His work operates in a realm between affect and methodology.

Interested in how a song or written language can physically occupy physical space, or how a natural form can generate a piece of music, he looks into the physicality of sculpture as opposed to the immateriality of music and language;  often employing arbitrary, invented systems of subjective translations.

Hollowed Water, his first major solo show in a public institution in the UK, was on view at Camden Art Centre, London, in 2020, and toured to ARCH, Athens in 2021. He has held solo exhibitions at Renata Fabbri, Milan (2022–23); On Stellar Rays, New York (2017, 2015, 2013); Aanant & Zoo, Berlin (2015, 2013); Max Wigram Gallery London (2011, 2009, 2007); The Breeder, Athens (2011, 2007); and Arcade (with Len Lye), London (2008), amongst others.

Selected gallery group shows include Madragoa, Lisbon (2022); Lisson Gallery, London (2016); Mor Charpentier, Paris (2011); RODEO, Istanbul (2011); and Grimm, Amsterdam (2010).

His work was featured at the 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012), Documenta 14 (2017), Fridericianum, Kassel (2017); Kunsthalle Wien (2016); Fondazione Prada, Ca Corner della Regina, Venice (2014); Performa 13, New York (2013); Tate Britain, London Art Now Live (2011), Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London and The Barbican Art Gallery, London (2008).

Species Counterpoint, a monograph on his work was co-published in 2021 by Lenz, Milan, with Camden Art Centre, London, and ARCH, Athens with essays by Dan Fox, Quinn Latimer, Jennifer Kabat and an interview with the artist and Martin Herbert.

He releases music with the Lo Recordings label in London (under his own name and the moniker Gavouna) and runs Daedalus Street with Rowena Hughes, a project facilitating the development of new artworks by invited artists in their studio in Athens.

Sophie Ko (Tbilisi, 1981) lives and works in Milan. At the heart of her artistic practice lies the concept of time, which is explored in its intense symbolic interaction with the materials she employs – mostly ashes of burnt images and pure pigments – and the images created. The change and instability of materials in relation to the flow of time are some of the constants of her artistic research. The Temporal Geographies, for example, provide an exemplification of a series of works eternally suspended between the act of creation and that of destruction, where the image is constantly subjected to a continuous process of modification through the slow and relentless collapse of the material of which it is made. Conceived through a conceptual and formal negotiation between sculpture and painting, these works stage “a bond made of weight, pressure, gravity, and the destruction of time on images, but also of formation, depth, return, and rebirth with respect to the passage of time.” Meaningful  metaphors of the caducity and mutability of existence, her works recall the trajectory of life that we trace, parallel to a slow but persistent collapsing movement.

Recent solo shows include: Italian Cultural Institute, London (2024); Estorick collection of Italian modern art, London (2024); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2015, 2018 and 2023); Contemporary Locus, Bergamo (2023); Postmasters Rome, with Marta Kucsora (2023); Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2022); EAST Galerie, Strasbourg (2022); Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna (2016 and 2021–22); BUILDINGBOX, Milan (2021); BUILDING Gallery, Milan (2020); Ca’Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice (2019); The OpenBox, Milan (2018).  She has participated in group exhibitions at Saudi Arabian Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA), Riyadh Saudi Arabia (2024); Premio di Grafica Santa Croce, Santa Croce sull’Arno, Pisa; Studio la Città, Verona; Societé Interludio, Turin; Circolo, Milan; Villa Croce Museo d’arte Contemporanea, Genova (2023); Palazzo Ducale, Gubbio (2022); Fondazione Malvina Menegaz, Castelbasso (2021); Palazzo Barbò Torre Pallavicina, Bologna (2021); MAC – Contemporary Art Museum, Lissone (2021); and Renata Fabbri, Milan (2020), among others. In 2016, Sophie Ko won the Lissone Prize for Painting organized by MAC – Contemporary Art Museum, Lissone. 

Chris Rocchegiani was born in 1977 in Jesi (Ancona), where she currently lives and works. She graduated in figurative arts from the State Institute of Art in Jesi and obtained a degree in Graphic Design from the ISIA in Urbino. She is an artist, art director, graphic design teacher at the ACCA Academy, and Basic Design lecturer at the Department of Design and Architecture at the University of Camerino.

She is the Co-founder of CH RO MO alongside Roberto Montani, a research duo focusing on visual languages in design and art; and the Founder of Pensiero Manifesto, a collective of creatives including artists, graphic designers and illustrators, who use posters as a public utility tool, cultivating practices of listening and giving back to the community.

Through various pictorial techniques and executive solutions, Chris Rocchegiani’s practice reflects on the compositional aspects that arise from the overlapping of line and color. Her paintings are characterised by the coexistence of sections of diverse nature: figurative, human, and animal elements blend with informal and synthetic parts, dictated by the predominance of line and action, and free colour fields, with a more lyrical and evocative character. Thus, multiple narratives, both real and potential, corporeal and transcendental, coexist on the surface of her paintings, like suspended fragments of a poem in transformation. Rocchegiani’s language is pluralistic and intentionally nonlinear, where error, contradiction, change, and contamination are necessary attributes of a painterly experience that opens up to the possible and the manifold, aspiring to the sensory experience of the sacred.

In the field of design, her projects have been awarded at the European Design Awards, at the Aiap Women Design Awards, by ADI (entering the shortlist for the Compasso d’Oro award), and by the Cariplo Foundation for Cultural Innovation.
Recent exhibitions: Pittura italiana oggi, Triennale Milano, Milan (2023); Linea 1201, MAXXI L’Aquila, L’Aquila (2022); Jumelles culturelles, Château de Mayenne, Mayenne (2022); La ripetizione, Projecktraum 145, Berlin (2021); I know you know that you know, Galleria Yudikone, Brescia (2020); Total Recall, Galleria Bianconi, Milan (2020); Libere Tutte, Casa Testori, Novate Milanese (2019); Diagrammi, Cripta747, Turin (2019).

Digging into the crevices of everyday experience and inspired by chance encounters with common objects, the works of Serena Vestrucci (b. Milan, 1986) interrogate and transform the ordinary through a diverse range of artistic processes and linguistic paradoxes. Fascinated by artefacts, situations, images, and materials picked out from everyday life (such as flags, pastels, fried squid, seasonal fruit), the artist turns these elements into the subject and raw material of her artistic experience. By modifying them and shifting them into fields of action different from their original context, Vestrucci draws attention to them, changing their appearance and filling them with new meanings, in an instantaneous and illusory poetics, barely visible and yet only apparently simple.
The outcome are works that, in their visual immediacy, subvert the perception of the work of art, changing its semantic value and inviting the viewer to rethink the way they observe and interpret their surroundings. Imbued with a subtle irony towards contemporaneity, Vestrucci’s works probe the obviousness of small things, giving back voice to what is often hidden, forgotten, or cast aside. Through a playful, yet blunt and provocative language, the artist elevates ambiguity to a necessary foundation for a more accurate understanding of reality.
After obtaining a BA from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Vestrucci moved to Venice, where in 2011 was awarded a residency at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation’s ateliers, and in 2013 obtained an MA in Design and Production of the Visual Arts at the IUAV University of Venice.

Selected solo exhibitions include Renata Fabbri, Milan (2021); FuoriCampo Gallery, Siena (2018); Gallery of Modern Art, Verona (2017); Archaeological Museum Antonio Salinas, Palermo (2017); Marsèlleria Permanent Exhibition, Milan (2016); Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art, Genoa (2015); and Otto Zoo Gallery, Milan (2013).

Her work has been featured in group shows at Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw (2022); Made in Cloister Foundation, Naples (2022); Imago Mundi Foundation, Treviso (2021); Pastificio Cerere Foundation, Rome (2020); Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art, Genoa (2020 and 2015); Palazzo Del Medico, Carrara (2020); Michetti Foundation Museum, Francavilla al Mare, Chieti (2020); Casa Testori, Novate Milanese (2019); Blitz, Valletta, Republic of Malta (2019); Italian Cultural Institute, New York (2018); Italian Cultural Institute, London (2018); Santa Maria della Scala Museum, Siena (2018); Palazzo Reale, Milan (2017 and 2015); Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venice (2017, 2012 and 2010); FRISE Künstlerhaus, Hamburg, (2014); Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno (2014); Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin (2014); GAM Gallery of Modern Art, Milan (2012); Venetian Institute of Sciences, Humanities and Arts, Venice (2012); and Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands (2011).

In 2017 she was awarded the 18th edition of Premio Cairo, and she was selected by the City of Milan to conceive and realise a permanent artwork in the frame of the ArtLine Milano public art commission.