This is Today
The Piran Coastal Galleries and A plus A Gallery of Venice are pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition “This is Today” on 19 October at 18:00 in Piran Town Gallery and Monfort exhibition building in Portoroz (Slovenia). The exhibition is organized under the patronage and support of the Slovenian Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Piran.
Invited artists: Paola Angelini, Thomas Braida, Fabio De Meo, Nebojša Despotović, Enej Gala, Paolo Gonzato, Andrea Grotto, Kensuke Koike, Silvia Mariotti, Valerio Nicolai, Luka Širok, Kristian Sturi, Aleksander Velišček, Špela Volčič, Ivan Žerjal.
“This is Today” presents for the first time abroad, the extraordinary artistic ferment in Venice. Institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts, IUAV Visual Arts and the ateliers of the Bevilacqua La Masa Fondation play the role of catalysts of creative energy. Venice has been for centuries a melting pot of cultures, and also today it keeps its characteristic attracting generations of young authors rich of their own cultural baggage. The scenery has its roots in historical and cultural contexts in which diverse artistic traditions like the Italian nineteenth century art is combined with German and Austrian heritage and the neighbouring cosmopolitan Eastern Europe. To better explain this phenomenon the famous diagram that Alfred Barr used for his exhibition of 1936 at the MoMA in New York was taken as an example. This way a pattern was constructed that allows a better insight in relationships and points of connection between the artistic and historical legacy and the modern day.
“This is Today” brings together the work of a large group of young artists who express themselves in a language in which the reading of the work takes place in a nonlinear way. The work, in fact, is often the result of a collage of stimulus and influences, which can be defined as the iconographic hypertexts that allow the viewer to create links similar to the process that all of us routinely use in our research on the Internet.
The pictorial, sculptural or photographic works of art are built through a set of images placed in relation to each other by a key element. As on the Internet the choice of a pivotal word opens a different document enabling endless reading paths, so do the images in the works selected for this exhibition, display not only the connections between the many subjects represented, but also between the different planes of the composition.
The picture, then, is chopped into many small pieces, iconographic appropriations juxtaposed or superimposed in a way that when putting together all the pieces, there is a new structure created in the work and a new meaning as a result of a personal mythology in relation to the contemporary social context.
The author’s role is precisely to give structure and meaning to all these small parts to reform a whole that is manifested in the artistic composition. From this scheme you can detect some constants that tend to repeat themselves in the chosen artists, who, making use of hypertext methodology, develop them in individual reports and interpretations.
The exhibition offers also a moment for reflection and assessment, in which a mature phenomenon is manifested, where artistic research begins to touch the significant peaks that need proper contextualization.
