Across The Globe: Artist Spotlight #2

Now that the galleries have been announced and their featured artists confirmed, we’re shining the spotlight on our participating galleries from across the globe. With a mixture of well-known faces and completely fresh talent, we’ll show you who’s who through a series of articles focusing on our 2019 attendees.As the second feature of our Across the Globe series, we’re heading to southern Europe and taking a closer look at our galleries from Spain, Italy and Montenegro. With them come a wide variety of emerging to well-known international artists working between mixed media, installations and unusual data recovery methods to produce their spectrum of diverse works.

Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte

Madrid

Coming back to Unseen Amsterdam for the 4th year in a row, Camara Oscura specialises in international contemporary artists. At this year’s Fair, the gallery will bring back Elina Brotherus (FI, b. 1972) with an ongoing series titled Les femmes de la Maison Carré. Set in the palatial interiors of La Maison Carré near Paris, Elina has been visiting this signature house by world-famous Alvar Aalto since 2015. From Mexico City to Madrid, Liza Ambrossio (MX, b. 1993) is one of the most promising Latin American photographers today. In her series The Rage of Devotion, she plays with the crossover between reality and fantasy by mixing different techniques. Returning to the Fair with new work, Cecilia De Val (ES, b. 1975) is expanding her project about the interplay of words and images in social media.

Spazio Nuovo

Rome

Participating for the first time at Unseen Amsterdam, Spazio Nuovo is a space for contemporary and emerging artists. The gallery will present a solo show of new work by Marco Maria Zanin (IT, b. 1983), an artist working with archival objects from small local museums in order to shed light on their collections. Marco will premiere a series composed of items formerly used by local farmers and fishermen, arranging them in the space according to the display criteria typical of the first primitive art exhibitions held in Paris and New York in the early twentieth century.

METRONOM

Modena

With a strong focus on boundary crossing and cutting edge photography and video, METRONOM hosts exhibitions of both Italian and international artists focusing particularly on unseen work from new, up-and-coming talent. Starting with the work of Fabrizio Bellomo (IT, b. 1982), he will present pieces from the series Screenshots and The Pixel Copyist: an ongoing research about the concept of identity and its representation. From Tokyo, Taisuke Koyama (JP, b. 1978) explores the possibility of image making in the post-digital age. Drawing from his previous series, Samples, Koyama will premiere work from two of his series: Interface and Revive. In Revive, he intentionally deleted all data of photographs taken in Tokyo and then revived them using a data recovery software to give rise to a series of images consisting of conversion errors; and in Interface, photographs from Samples were projected onto pieces of concrete found in Tokyo, which he re-photographed by focusing on the surfaces of the rocks. The gallery will also represent artistic duo Christto & Andrew, former campaign artists of Unseen, with their new body of work Encrypted Purgatory, in which they present scenes that recall a science fiction imaginary, where primitives and new technologies are fused in an indefinite time. METRONOM will also present Elena Aya Bundurakis’ (JP/EL, b. 1988) work as a site-specific installation composed of a selection of recent pieces from the series Eating Magma, where she explores the notion of being a living organism in today’s world. Elena has also been selected as a nominee for the ING Unseen Talent Award 2019.

mc2gallery

With two locations in Montenegro and Milan, mc2gallery represents a mixture of well-known international artists and rising talents. They’re bringing two artists to Unseen Amsterdam this year, starting with Patricio Reig (AR, b. 1959) who will premiere brand new work at Unseen Amsterdam. Patricio creates images through his own technique of using bitumen, coffee or sensitive emulsions applied to different types of paper; this gives the image an ancient and precious appearance. Paolo Ciregia’s (IT, b. 1987) series 40 dittatori, documents the life-span of monuments of dictators from the twentieth century as an exploration of time and the impact it has on objects and, consequently, on our historical memory.

Podbielski Contemporary

Relocated from Berlin to Milan, Podbielski Contemporary represents a wide range of artists, who address the geopolitics of the Balkans, the Middle East, Italy and Germany, as well as new territories from a transcultural perspective. Following this theme, Massimiliano Gatti’s (IT) series Le Nuvole is a research into the relationships between historical memory and the present, by combining his photographs of the archaeological site of Palmyra, with ISIS’s video outtakes of its destruction. While in his series Cypher-Cypress, Yuval Yairi (IL, b. 1961) treats each image as an archaeological dig, merging non sequential times, events and places in order to create a multilayered moral space where time is compressed. Also drawing from the concept of time and space, Thomas Jorion (FR, b. 1976) will present his series Veduta, which transports us into an Italy of past decadence and beauty, through his large format photographs of empty and grandiose spaces.