Exclusively at ANSA, the images taken in Federico Salmi's New York studio during the creation of 'Ship of Fools', the new work by the Bolognese artist, pioneer of media art, which will be presented in the exhibition 'Solmi-Ship of Fools', from 18 April to 28 July in Venice in the seventeenth-century Palazzo Donà dalle Rose.
Desecrating, irreverent and subversive, Solmi returns to Italy with an exhibition, curated by Dorothy Kosinski and co-curated by Renato Miracco, which becomes an event, shaped by the use of the most innovative technologies.
Through a path that unfolds over 10 years of production, between eclectic and hybrid languages ranging from gaming to cinema, from painting to ceramics, the exhibition is an immersion in Solmi's artistic research, structured around different groups of works: videos, paintings, sculptures ceramic, a virtual reality work, a holographic sculpture developed in collaboration with Var Group and the work 'Ship of Fools', 3 by 6 metres, inspired by 'The Raft of the Medusa by Gericault', with references to Plato's Republic and a book of the same name by 1494 by Sebastian Brant, published in Basel and illustrated with 114 woodcuts.
A careful explorer of the possibilities offered by new technologies, Federico Solmi thus creates an exhibition that moves between physical and virtual reality, recovering the popular and social nature of art but with a surrealist approach steeped in satire, involving its spectators in an immersive experience, accompanied by signed music by multi-Grammy Award winning sound designer Marc Urselli.
With this exhibition Solmi rereads and rewrites history through the eyes of those who have undergone this history: in the monumental 'Ship of Fools', the most ambitious of his recent works, Julius Caesar is chased by paparazzi, Garibaldi travels around in a limousine, Sitting Bull and the Inca emperor Pachacuti become rock stars and Elon Musk depicts KimKardashian in apocalyptic bacchanalia in a grotesque theater show.
"Ship of Fools is a metaphorical work - explains Solmi - a world led by inadequate leaders that becomes a parody of the shipwreck of humanity".
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA