We can work it out

Bea Bonafini (Bonn, 1990) lives and works between London and Rome. She received a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2014, and a MA in Painting form the Royal College of Art, London, in 2016. She works across painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, tapestry and textiles, expanding their corresponding formal interrelationships. Bonafini’s interdisciplinary practice draws from oneiric visions, overlapping personal and ancient mythologies. Her tactile, intimate worlds center around sensuality, vulnerability and fantasy, forming swirling scenarios that are fragmented and multi-layered. Figures are evanescent and transcendental, referencing spiritual imagery where fluid bodies collide, disperse, swim, fly and fall, openings to encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly. Holistic perspectives are developed in close dialogue with architecture, where space is approached as an extension to the work to envelop the viewer. Bonafini’s solo exhibitions include Nosbaum Reding, Luxembourg (2022); Bosse & Baum, London (2022 and 2019); Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Rome (2022); Setareh Gallery, Berlin (2022); LAAA (Laboratorio de Arte, Arquitectura y Arqueología), Mexico City (2022); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2021 and 2018); Eduardo Secci, Florence (2021); Operativa, Rome (2020); Chloe Salgado, Paris (2019); Lychee One Gallery, London (2018); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2017); and Fieldworkds Gallery, London (2017). She has participated in group exhibitions at JARILAGER Gallery, Cologne (2022); Cob Gallery, London (2021); Larsen Warner, Stockholm (2020); Rolando Anselmi, Berlin (2019); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2018), amongst others. Residencies include: Palazzo Monti, Brescia (2021); Rosa Lee Travel Grant, British School at Rome (2020); Abbey Scholarship, British School at Rome (2019–20); La Berlugane-Maleki Residency and Commission Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France (2019); Platform Southwark Studio Residency, London (2018), Fibra Residency, Colombia (2018); Fieldworks Studio Residency, London (2017); Villa Lena, Toiano, Italy (2016); and The Beekeepers Residency, Castro Marim, Portugal (2015). 

Ana Cardoso (Lisbon, 1978) lives and works between Lisbon and New York. Her multifaceted painting practice employs an array of medium-specific approaches: from abstraction to formlessness, materiality to illusion, conceptualism to the ready-made. She explores painting’s elastic content in relation to its context, its production in relation to its presentation; and pivots between the viewer and the history of painting. For her, throughout history but also in this digital age, the viewer activates and performs the painting, its flatness and its depths. She works with predefined structures – modular canvases that fit comfortably the length of her open arms, triangles, squares, parallelograms, rectangles – that mutate into dynamic new compositions which are then again reshuffled, recombined, performed, stacked, or moved through a vast landscape of fragments. Cardoso’s paintings reveal different dimensions throughout the diverse moments of their production and distribution process. Optical folds are suggested when the works are installed; her configurations play with recto-verso concepts and three-dimensionality; her folded strips present recto and verso simultaneously and become performances that integrate the broader site of painting. Within Ana Cardoso’s inclusive painting corpus, Neo-Concretism and Formalism stand out as open source alphabets that the body inhabits to reformulate former logics and parameters, using structure and the monochrome as vessels for romantic experimentation, site of accidents, questioning, contamination, encounters, and a continuous array of self-reflexive and mediated gestures.

Ana Cardoso received her MA in Fine Art from the Hunter College, New York, in 2006. She has had solo or duo exhibitions at Nuno Centeno, Porto (2019); Parapet Real Humans, St Louis (2018); Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva Museum, Lisbon (2018); Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin (2017); Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Knokke (2016); Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2015); MNAC – Contemporary Art Museum, Lisbon (2015); Múrias Centeno, Lisbon (2014); Longhouse Projects, New York (2014); Maisterravalbuena, Madrid (2012); Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2012); Soloway, New York (2011); Conduits, Milan (2011); and Southfirst, New York (2008); among others. Cardoso was included in group exhibitions at Galerias Municipais – Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon (2022); Cristina Guerra, Lisbon (2021); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2020); Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2018–19); MAAT Museum, Lisbon (2017); Rachel Uffner, New York (2015); Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, Cluj (2012); Prague Biennial 5 (2011); Tate St Ives (2011); The Kitchen, New York (2009); White Flag Projects, Saint Louis (2008); and Culturgest, Lisbon (2007). Her work has been featured in Artforum, Flash Art, Mousse, Modern Painters, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporânea and included in the book Painting Now edited by Suzanne Hudson and published by Thames & Hudson (London) in 2015. She has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2019–20) and was a fellow of Shandaken: Projects, Paint School master class, New York (2018–19). 

T-Yong Chung (Tae-gu, South Korea, 1977) lives and works in Milan. Classicism, Arte Povera and minimalism are three elements that keep returning in his sculptural and installation work, where the tension between the fullness of Western culture and the essentiality of Eastern culture create a full formal balance. The artist uses waste materials, such as antique chairs, rusty tools and pieces of sheet metal, that he dismantles and reassembles, smooths and polishes, giving them a new identity, with a permanent link to the dignity of their past. He is famous for his sculptures depicting human faces, made of plaster, ceramics, resin, wax and bronze. He draws inspiration from Greek and Roman classicism, but also from contemporary figures of European culture, that are relevant in his day-to-day life. His sculpture busts are characterized by a clean cut that is handmade and then refined and this creates an  abstraction and they evoke an idea of absence, an uninterrupted presence. Through this process of subtraction and cancellation- gestures that evoke generative acts in the eastern culture- the artworks reveal their essence in the research of different perspectives, different spaces, different identities.

T-Yong Chung graduated in Environmental Sculpture at the University of Seoul and then he graduated in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera. From 2007 to today his works have been presented in different personal exhibitions in Florence, Bologna, Milan and Naples and in collective exhibitions in important spaces such as Careof, Milan; Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea of Monfalcone; Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea in Trento, Neon/fdv, Milan and Bologna, but also in Tokyo and Seoul. He took part in many artistic residency and workshops such as Museo Carlo Zauli in Faenza and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice.

Elif Erkan (Ankara, Turkey, 1985) lives and works in Vienna. She holds an MFA from Otis College or Art and Design, Los Angeles, USA (2016) and HfBK Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Recent solo show include: Where you they form, The Pill (Istanbul, 2020), What is that possesses me, Weiss Berlin (Berlin, 2018), Ex Oriente Lux, Park View (Los Angeles, 2016); Lotus Eaters, Weiss Berlin (Berlin, 2016); Standards for Living, Maison des Arts, (Brussels, 2015), Konzentration der Kräfte, Portikus, (Frankfurt, 2015).

She took part in several group shows worldwide including: Biennale Sculpture Garden, curated by Devrim Bayar (Geneve, 2022) Desilusionarium V, Night Gallery (Los Angeles, 2021), What Remains Is What The Poets Found, PS120 (Berlin, 2018); Work Loves
Me, Lanserhaus, Appiano sulla strada della vino (Italy, 2018), LA Should Die Vor Glück, Just Married (Alhambra/Los Angeles, 2017); The New Normal, Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, 2017); Paroxysm of Union, Kunsthalle Freeport Union (Athens, 2017); The New Normal, Supa Salon (Istanbul, 2017); We remember it for you wholesale, CTA Building, Sydney (Australia, 2017); Cum-Ex, Kunsthalle Freeport Union (Berlin, 2017); We remember it for you wholesale, Part II, Minerva (Sydney, 2017); Home, Night Club (Chicago, Illinois, USA 2016); Capital. Debt, Territory, Utopia, Hamburger Bahnhof, (Berlin, 2016); Gut Instinct, The Gluckman Museum (Cork, IR, 2016); The Social Register, Park View (Los Angeles, 2015);

A Possible Collection, Honolulu (Zurich, 2015), Career Woman, Holz Kohle Koks (Berlin, 2015), Villa Aurora Revisited, organized by Park View, Balice Hertling (New York, 2015); Cookie Gate, Ellis King (Dublin, 2015); Caught in the Act, Kriya 3000 (New York, 2015); My, My a Body does get around, Wilfried Lentz Gallery (Rotterdam, 2015); Lemon Leaves, Villa Aurora (Los Angeles, 2015).

She is the recipient of numerous grants including: Hessiche Kulturstiftung (2020), Paris Studio Residency (2016) Villa Aurora Berlin Fellow (2015). Relevant residencies include: La cité internationale des arts (Paris, 2010/2021); Eau et Gaz, Appiano sulla strada del vino (Italy, 2018); Villa Aurora Berlin Fellowship (Berlin, 2016); WIELS Residency Program (Brussels, 2014).

Matthieu Haberard (Toulouse, 1991) lives and works in Paris. He received a BA in Fine Art from the ISDAT, Toulouse, in 2013, and a MA in Fine Art from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, in 2016. Moving between heterogeneous languages, Matthieu Haberard’s artistic practice investigates the threshold that separates childhood from adulthood. It is in this limbo, ambiguous and full of potential, that Haberard’s poetics becomes concrete, poised between childish fantasies – fights, metamorphosis, titanic enterprises and feats – and the ironic representation of reality. Through a playful and attentive look at the contemporaneity, Haberard gives life to sculptures that recall the mystical and warlike imagination of the Middle Ages: masks, swords, shields and armour meticulously decorated and handcrafted with materials such as wood or cardboard. Intended as relics of bygone eras and fictitious battles, his works –desemantized and stripped of their defensive function – remind us of the blurred boundary between play and violence, innocence and malice, childlike desire and disillusionment that inevitably looms with maturity. His drawings are often inspired by traditional Chinese and Japanese martial patterns, distilled down to their most minimalist reduction.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2017, 2019 and 2022); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2021); L’assaut de la menuiserie, Saint-Étienne (2021); and École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris (2016). His work has been featured in group shows at Palais des Beaux Arts, Paris (2020); Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2020); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2020); Minimarket, Paris (2019); Bwa Gallery, Warsaw (2019); Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2019); Halle de la Villette, Paris (2019); Fondation Emerige, Paris (2018); DOC, Paris (2020); Wendy Gallery, Paris (2018); and Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard (2017). In 2022 Haberard was artist in residence at Maroquinerie de Guyenne in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul (Gironde) in the context of the Artists’ Residencies program promoted by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.

Sophie Ko (Tbilisi, 1981) lives and works in Milan. At the core 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: 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); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2015 and 2018); and The OpenBox, Milan (2018). She has participated in group exhibitions at Palazzo Ducale di Gubbio (2022); Fondazione Malvina Menegaz, Castelbasso (2021); Albergo delle Povere, Palermo (promoted by RISO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Sicily, Palermo) (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. 

The work of Giovanni Kronenberg (Milan, 1974, lives and works in Milan) comprises essentially sculptures and drawings: unusual or rare objects and natural artifacts – like rocks and stones, minerals and precious crystals, horns, bones, furs, sea sponge and ostrich eggs – which the artist defines as “not worn out by gazes”. Often collectible objects, Kronenberg operates on them with minimal insertions and transformations that bring together distant times, often unreachable. Through actions like twisting, occluding, replacement, and superimposition – but also, on the contrary, using slight and temporary interventions – the artist crafts unexpected objects with an eccentric, magnetic, and at the same time disturbing presence. The creation of a “combinatorial grammar” is the operation at the core of his work: a language that effects the slow sedimentation of the evocative qualities inherent in objects, on their subsequent alteration, through forms of intrusion. This relation between objects and reality, mostly ambiguous and elusive, also represents a key to Kronenberg’s drawings. Here, the image, suspended in an abstract dimension, gives rise to a space without references that seems to translate the figure’s presence into a kind of epiphany or apparition. 

Among his recent solo shows: z2o Sara Zanin, Rome (2016, 2019 and 2022); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2017 and 2020); Quartz Studio, Turin (2020); Galleria Fuoricampo, Siena/Brussels (2014); and Studio Guenzani, Milan (2006, 2007 and 2012). Recent group exhibitions include: Museo Civico Villa La Rinchiostra, Massa (2021); Museo Diocesano, Foligno (2021); z2o Sara Zanin, Rome (2020); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2020); Civic Medieval Museum, Bologna (2020); Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza (2013); MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2012); The Polish Institute of Rome (2012); Nomas Foundation, Rome (2012); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2011); Castello Colonna di Genazzano, Genazzano (2010); Peep-Hole, Milan (2009 and 2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, Lugano (2009); MAXXI – National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome (2007); Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Monfalcone (2008); Arte all’Arte X, San Gimignano (2005); Viafarini, Milan (2004 and 2005); and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como (2003).

Andrea Martinucci (Rome, 1991) is a visual artist who lives and works between Milan and Rome. He works across painting, writing and moving images. His artistic process takes place through assemblages and overlaps across diversified contents. By composing images through modification, fragmentation and hybridisation, the artist elaborates metaphorical nonlinear narratives. His works employ humor, absurdity and poetry to explore themes such as memory loss (whether real or surrogate), experiences and sublimation processes, in order to hypothesize other consciences. His observation of reality translates into the rethinking of everyday objects emptied of their daily value, as ruins expelled from a society speeding towards its own collapse. He then processes these unconscious contents that are able to welcome the mysterious reminiscences to Unknown Universes, ultimately letting viewers decipher the resulting multitude of symbols for themselves.

His work has been exhibited in institutional and experimental spaces such as Institut Français – Palazzo delle Stelline (Milan IT, 2016); IIC Los Angeles (Los Angeles USA, 2022); Mattatoio (Rome IT, 2016); Palazzo Reale (Milan IT, 2019); Tang Contemporary Art (Hong Kong CN, 2020); FuturDome (Milan IT, 2017); Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome IT, 2012); IUNO (Rome IT, 2022); VUNU Gallery (Kosice SK, 2020); ZETA Contemporary Art Center (Tirana AL, 2021); Museum of Contemporary Art of Villa Croce (Genoa IT, 2012); Museum of Art and Archaeology of Maremma (Grosseto IT, 2017); Fondazione Pastificio Cerere (Rome IT, 2012) and In De Ruimte Space (Gent BE, 2019).

In 2020 he was among the winners of Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere (supported by Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity by the Italian Ministry of Culture and by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), with Turbomondi (Melodia), a video installation destined for the Public Collection of Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, Rome, IT. He took part in several projects, among which: Tonight we are young – New Italian Art, Triennale (Milan IT, 2022); Fenomeno Pasquarosa, La Fondazione – Nicola Del Roscio Foundation (Rome IT, 2020); MANIFesta – Iniziative di II, MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (Rome IT, 2021), Rereading the Archive, ICA Foundation (Milan, IT 2022) and SPRINT, O’ Space (Milan IT, 2017).

Clarissa Falco (Genoa, 1995) holds a Masters Degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from NABA. She works, as a visual artist and performer, on issues related to the body reflecting on its condition in a constant dialogue with mechanical elements. Her works start from the idea of ​​the body conceived as a machine, beyond the distinction between subject and object, which is deprived of its appearance to become an engine and gear, part of a machine. In the performative activity, the machine-body binarism is expressed through an automatic gesture of the performers, as if trapped in a time loop that is always the same.

Dialoguing with science and wondering how it deals with the body is what moves Clarissa interest in the machinic element. With the term machine she is not referring only to the structure but also to the ethical, social, political and cultural practices that affect us. But what are the political, ethical, social and aesthetic limits of the body? Contemporary culture has shifted the focus of hybridization from high-tech laboratories to popular culture. Science fiction and horror literature (and cinema) contribute to developing this theme, underlining their ability to record our lives changes. The consolidated success of horror and sci-fi genres are a symptom of a new phenomenon that prefers the deviant, or the mutant, over the more conventional versions of the human being. Precisely for this reason, they provide us with appropriate cultural representations of these changes and transformations. In her artistic practice, Clarissa wants to get out of the putrefied imagination where the beauty of the anomalous body was not designed to move towards a representation of the subject that underlines the urgency to think about the unity of the body-machine.

Giulio Saverio Rossi (Massa, 1988) lives and works in Turin. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice and at the Academy of Fine Arts of Turin. He is now teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts of Urbino.

His solo exhibitions include: Il giardino di notte, Casa Masaccio (San Giovanni Valdarno, 2021); Nuova Scuola delle Nuvole e della Nebbia, Sichuan Fine Arts Institue (Chongqing, China, 2019). His work has been presented in group exhibitions, institutional spaces and museums including Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Tokyo (Tokyo, 2021) and GAM (Turin, 2020).  He has participated in international programs including China Project, promoted by MAD Murate Art District and Zhong Art International (Chongqing, 2019); Mediterranea18, BJCEM (Albania, 2017); Real Presence, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’arte contemporanea (Belgrado, Rivoli, 2008). In 2020 he is the winner of the public notice Cantica21. Italian contemporary art everywhere, promoted by MIC (DGCC) and MAECI (DGSP).  His work recently became part of the collection Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.