Gabriele De Santis
Doppio Titolo: Linea d’aria; Sweet dream, 2021
Digital collage
Dimensions variable

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH GABRIELE DE SANTIS

I’ve been thinking for long to transport my artworks or even an entire exhibition using my bike. It would be certainly slow, but gentle with the environment and long the way I would have enough time to think or even make more artworks.
If my bike had wings and it could fly as a parrot, I would need to pedal for just 6917 km from my studio to reach the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Artworks could fit in my handlebar basket, like Elliot and E.T. Dreaming is sweet.
[Cartoline Faticose 04]

Roberto Pugliese
Critici Ostinati Ritmici
solenoids, circuits, microcontrollers, cables, sensors, internet connection
2010
Courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
Photo credit: Michele Alberto Sereni

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH ROBERTO PUGLIESE

Nature, a superior and mystical intelligence, is constantly mortified by one of its creations, the human being who, like a tumor, attacks his own organism. Just as nature allows man to exploit it, at the same time it has made sure that man, by evolving, endowed himself with a conscience and sensitivity, weapons that nature uses to defend itself. Sometimes human sensitivity translates into inspiration and leads to artistic production, which has the duty and the power to be a witness to society, a means of communication through which a common conscience can develop.

Göksu Kunak a.k.a. Gucci Chunk
AN(A)KARA
2021
Photo credit: Ethan Folk
Courtesy the artist

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH GUCCI CHUNK

The creation of visual images of the East
belongs to the imagination of
the Western mind.

A legal bullet
A dead body

Welcome
We provide
Personalized
Selective
Westernization
Are you tired of being ashamed of your traditional identity?
Did you have trouble voicing that you’re actually Muslim?
Are you afraid that Islam will take over your democracy?
Do you have fear of degeneration as a result of too much Westernization?
We’re here to guide you
The A List Health Hack
Look & feel your best
From a Sick Man to
The New Man

He is so handsome, right?

Applause!

Jessica Stockholder
The studio August 2021
Photo credit: Jessica Stockholder
Courtesy the artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH JESSICA STOCKHOLDER

Privacy
Me & You
You and Me
And Vitamin D
The sun also rises
Birds flying out to sea
The furnace sound cries
Softly pushing into Sunday
Headlines floating on devices
Settled softly down between us
Foods & drink move slowly through
Bodies who are hosting winding tube
As on appliance, time blinks by, on stove
Blood takes its walk-through veins in house
While on the couch the bodies hold whose gaze
One instant after instant & the next out the window

Benedikt Hipp
Feste Eigenschaften elastischer Körper
2021
diptych, oil on MDF
176 x 270 cm each
Courtesy the artist and Monitor Roma, Lisbona, Pereto

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH BENEDIKT HIPP

In the last year in Rome as a scholarship holder at Villa Massimo, I continued my experimentation in the pictorial and sculptural field, investigating primordial figures and parts of bodies, places of transformation and transition. The body is a recurring theme in my work. I move between painting, sculpture and objects – between fiction and material. Sometimes this interaction seems to be analogous to the daily conflict between our ideas, our flesh and our bones. This conflict is where we live. Regardless of our origins or where we are on this planet, we all share that eternal in-between field.

Graham Hudson
Athleisure Antiquity (Fountain)
2020
940 cm x 980 cm x 350 cm
Scaffold, exercise balls, hose pipe, water, steel pool and polypropylene figures; Discobolus, David, Nike and Venus
Commissioned by Wavelength, Shanghai
Courtesy, Monitor Rome, Lisbon, Pereto

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH GRAHAM HUDSON

Do you desire to build a beautiful body? In 1882, circus performer, Friedriech Wilhem Müller toured Italy, inspired by sculptures like Michelangelo’s David’, he would re-mould his body in their image. He re-named himself Eugen Sandow, becoming the world’s first body builder and a symbol of Modernism. He’s in Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ and Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. Schwarzenegger calls Sandow ‘My Hero’, he inspired NASA’s Aerobics and modern Yoga. But the Roman sculptures were copies of lost Greek works, which were more maths algorithm than physical study. Today we chase this tale of classicism, modernism and facsimile to dream the unattainable.

Michael Fliri
Stargazer (Self-portrait)
2020
Photography
Courtesy Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH MICHAEL FLIRI

– I quickly held out my hand to him: “Done! it’s a deal, you have my shadow for the purse.” He shook my hand, knelt down in front of me without delay, and I beheld him, with admirable dexterity, gently free my shadow, from the head down to the feet, from the grass, lift it up, roll it together, fold it, and finally tuck it into his pocket –

The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl, Adelbert von Chamisso (1813)

Let’s reverse this novel. The self-portrait is extracted from the pocket like a haptic sculpture, detaching a transparent surface from it and, with “alchemical” interventions, it reaches a gradual dematerialization to finally manifest itself as an ephemeral image of light/shadow.

By analogical means “Stargazer (Self-portrait)” finds a speculative visual language that appears digital.

Laura Pugno
Dominante / Recessivo
2018
photographic printing, wood, glass and polyurethane
44x32x19 cm
Courtesy the artist

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH LAURA PUGNO

Our envelope, as I have called it, the cultural insulation that separates us from nature, is rather like (to use a figure that has haunted me from childhood) the window of a lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mirror of our own concerns, including our concern about nature. As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of its existence. But occasionally the mirror turns into a real window, through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature that got along for untold aeons of time without us, seems to have produced us only by accident, and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so. 

[Northrop Frye, Creation and Recreation]

June Crespo
e para lá que eu vou
2020
Bronze and ceramic coat, 2 parts
cm.72x23x11, cm.71×23,5×9
Installation dimensions variable
Photo credit: Jesús Rodríguez
Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH JUNE CRESPO

“Para além da orelha existe um som, à extremidade do olhar um aspecto, às pontas dos dedos um objeto – é para lá que eu vou.
À ponta do lápis o traço.
Onde expira um pensamento está uma idéia, ao derradeiro hálito de alegria uma outra alegria, à ponta da espada a magia – é para lá que eu vou.
Na ponta dos pés o salto.
Parece a história de alguém que foi e não voltou – é para lá que eu vou.
Ou não vou? Vou, sim. E volto para ver como estão as coisas. Se continuam mágicas. Realidade? eu vos espero. E para lá que eu vou.”

[Fragment of “É para lá que eu vou” by Clarice Lispector]

Shafei Xia
Profumo concerto
2020
watercolor on sandal paper mounted on canvas
cm 110×112 
Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna
Photo credit: Carlo Favero 

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH SHAFEI XIA

The great director Federico Fellini defined himself as a clown, he used to say that films were his circus. And life is Shafei’s circus.

Sometimes I’m a clown who brings joy to people. Sometimes I’m the tiger who has been tamed and has to jump through the ring of fire. Sometimes I’m the master of violence. I want to control everything.

My approach to life is a game and, as such, also the circus embodies this face: it makes others smile while preserving a universe of emotions and oppositions.