Alessandro Casciaro

For years now this German artist has been continuing his quest to combine complex digital manipulations of photography with architectural elements or virtual spaces.

He does not seek to reproduce reality, as is the case with photography, but rather to create a new reality, an individual place or a landscape, with the aid of an obvious technique distinctly reminiscent of painting. If his previous works were characterised by strong objective and narrative elements, his new cycle is almost introspective. The references he makes to other artistic movements (the way he draws on the iconography and the colouring of American abstract expressionism is undeniable) highlight the close relationship which the artist perceives between the product of his own imagination and reality as he experiences it, and the heritage left to us by the masters of classical painting. It represents a form of veneration, whilst simultaneously regenerating and reactivating his work. Castell draws inspiration and creative impulses from moments of peace and contemplation. According to the artist, this is rather like dreaming. Much is stored in our subconscious mind and can be conjured up in moments of peace and quiet.
The pictures created in this way refer less to actual events or definite stories, but rather portray an underlying mood, the inner feelings and sentiments of the artist, although they are also to do with allegorical symbols and collective thoughts. Motifs and images from different worlds and times, fragmentary traces from the past, the present and a projected future, are grouped together and give rise to a plethora of interpretations and associations.

Giovanni Castell was born in 1962 in Munich. He is a photographer, famous for his portraits of illustrious personalities from the worlds of entertainment, sports and fashion. He began his career as an artist in the late 1980s. He lives and works in Hamburg.

Jürgen Klauke (Kliding, 1943) is a unique figure in contemporary art. Above all, he paved the way for staged photography by conceptualising the photographic medium and elevating it to the immanent theme of his art. He has raised the question of gender differentiation more emphatically and radically than others, and so in doing has exacerbated to the point of excess the problem of identity with his sometimes provocative images. He himself speaks of the "aestheticisation of the existential". He participated at Documenta 6 & 8 and at the Biennale di Venezia. Jürgen Klauke lives and works in Cologne.

The impact of the works of Robert Pan derives from their beauty of concept and construction, from the intensity and splendor of their colors, from the exactitude and sure effect of the way those colors are nuanced. 

The pigments are applied in numerous successive layers, sealed in resin, and filed and polished, all in the light of carefully construed relationships between areas of opacity and transparence. Pan’s craftsmanship is the vehicle for the achievement of a multidimensional experience of color in which larger and more complex tones result from the varying articulation of the hues that resonate beneath them. Robert Pan has always looked askance at the obvious, and has once again decided to voyage into places outside the realms of reason. He complicates our vision of daily experience, leading us beyond the extant and into the Eden of imagination, at the antipodes of objective observation. He allows us to grasp both the visible and invisible, material physicality and immaterial idea, the indeterminate point of view no less than the world of imperceptible detail, the metaphoric flowing of color and the immutable solidification of resins.

Robert Pan was born in Bolzano in 1969. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Sculpture, in Urbino (I) from 1987 to 1991. From 1991 to 1992 he studied in Paris, then from '92 to '93 in London. In 1993 Robert Pan moved to New York on a scholarship and lived there until 1995. In 2013 he moved to Miami. He currently lives and works in Bolzano.

Josef Rainer was born in 1970 in Bressanone (I). Between 1991 and 1997 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. From 2001 to 2003 he received a scholarship in Vienna and since 2003 has divided his time between Dufftown and Scotland. In 2008 he stayed in London and in 2010 in Vienna. In 2019 he won the HGV Artist of the Year award. He currently lives and works in Bressanone.

Presented on large-scale canvases and depicted in vibrant, almost lurid colours, Kinki Texas’s subjects may appear to have been quickly dashed off but have in fact been developed over a period of months. Their lengthy process of creation is only revealed on closer inspection, when the different stages of the picture’s evolution can gradually be traced.

While Kinki Texas has a particular theme and subject matter in mind when he begins working on his pictures, he also reacts to what happens during the painting process, with the result that the development of the images can take unexpected turns. He paints, sprays, writes, wipes and scrapes away until he reaches a state where any additional painterly touch would overload the image, but any missing one would make it seem unfinished. The heroic figures in “Kinki Texas Space”, this is what the artist calls his creative universe, which draws as much inspiration from the comic genre as it does from television’s History Channel, employing means of depiction borrowed from graffiti and trash culture as well as from centuries of history painting, their appearance ranges from slightly strange to truly bizarre; some of them have a warlike and at times rather frightening demeanour; they confront the viewer with loaded guns, pose in suits of armour with swords drawn or like Native Americans with headdresses, bows and arrows.

Kinki Texas was born 1969 in Bremen (D); 2005 Master‘s degree in cultural studies and philosophy at the University of Bremen. He lives and works in Bremen.

In his works on canvas, paper or glass, Antonello Viola traces a chromatic perimeter where, through a process of accumulation, stratification and sedimentation, the canvas becomes a place devoted to meditation and the research of the absolute. 

The artist converts invisible into visible with thin layers of paint that are then scraped, removed and deleted. The painting's quiet surface is animated by signs that reveal what lies underneath, the deep, pulsating matter that ultimately gives shape to the work. The artist's visual experiences and the memory of them are absorbed by this process of stratification and sublimated in the colour layers. Through the material density of his work, Viola establishes a new relationship with space, a renewed dialogue between the inner dimension of the work and the environment that surrounds it, in which the artist does not act instinctively or empirically, but moves from a specific project. This simple shape is intended to hold the colour in its perimeter, a fence whose boundaries are instead constantly exceeded by the vibrating energy of the act of painting. Viola establishes a new relationship with the modern tradition of monochrome painting, where the reduction of the pictorial vocabulary corresponds to a positive and constructive understanding of the world, which perception is renewed through the energy of colour. His most recent works have been characterised by the use of quite varied materials: Japanese paper, glass, gold leaf and oil pigments; single and multiple formats which are presented in careful compositions.

Antonello Viola was born in 1966 in Rome; received his degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1989; after a long period of study in Spain, he received a PhD from the Fine Arts Department of the University La Laguna. Teaches decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna since 1996. His work was exhibited in Rome, galleria Il segno; Milan, Galleria L’Affiche, Bolzano, Galleria Goethe; Frankfurt, Carloni Spazio Arte and Peter Bauschke Gallery; Wien, Gallery Image, Italian Cultural Institute; New York, Magnet Gallery. Lives and works in Rome and Bologna.