BIOGRAPHY

Federico Solmi was born in Bologna, Italy in April 1973 and currently lives and works in New York. His exhibitions, which often combine articulate installations composed of different media such as video, drawings, mechanical sculptures and paintings, uses bright colors and a satirical aesthetic to portray a dystopian vision of our present day society. Power is often the nemesis in his worlds, manifesting itself in the elliptical layers of the Guggenheim Museum (King Kong and the End of the World, video 2006), the shiny Prada shoes of the Pope (The Evil Empire, video 2007), and the personal obsession to be as famous as the giant letters that spell out “Hollywood”. The artist uses images culled from the video game industry, pop culture, and the Internet and collages them with a historical influence to produce original artworks about the seemingly disparate subject at hand. In “The Evil Empire”, he looks to the disciplines of the old masters; in one frame of the animation one can pick out a recognizable scene from the video game Doom 3 superimposed on the magnificence that is the dome of the St Peter’s Basilica. The process of his art, similar to his inspirations, involves the cutting edge as well as the ancient; a 3D environment is built to provide a structure for the final drawings that compose his videos. What results from the combination of all these elements is art that is humorous, absurd, and scathingly critical of our contemporary society.

Federico’s work has been featured in the following museums: Centre Pompidou, Paris,
Drawing Center, New York; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Musées de la Ville de Rouen, Australian Center of Moving Images, Melbourne, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta, India, Contemporary Art Center of Rouboix, Palazzo Delle Arti,Naples, Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy. In addition, his video animations have been screened in several film and video festivals such as Loop, Barcelona, IndieLisboa, Lisbon, Impakt festival, Utrecth as well as in established contemporary art fairs including Pulse Miami; Pulse New York; Art Brussels; FEMACO Mexico; Artissima. His work has been reviewed by publications such as Flash Art Magazine, Tema Celeste, Art Actuelle, ArtNet.com, Artfacts.net, Contemporary Magazine, Marie Claire, and newspapers such as Le Figaro’, Daily News, El Mundo, El Pais, il Giornale, Il Mattino, il Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, America Oggi, Exibart, an Italian based contemporary art magazine, features a drawing from the video “King Kong and the End of the World” on the cover of it’s January 2006 issue.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

As an untiring observer of the alienated scenery of the metropolitan reality, I am focusing, in my installations and videos, to analyze the paradoxical situation that modifies our approach and our attitude toward everyday life. The neurotic urban landscape, the frenetic life in the big city and the colossal contradiction of contemporary society, are the key themes on which my artistic search has been based.

Catapulted into the middle of an undecipherable reality, the protagonists of my artwork are typically lost characters, confused people who are desperately seeking their role and their identity, forced to live inside a mad and hostile society without rules. A world that inexorably continues to regenerate and to renew itself, but at the same time is falling apart in front of our eyes. The universe that I like to represent is the exaltation of a present that is crumbling. It is also a criticism of a system that approves and trusts without questioning the fragile foundation on which our culture and post-modernist society is based. To be completely honest, I am not interested to transfer to canvas the most important facts that are sculpting our age. I absolutely do not consider myself a chronicler of the current days. On the contrary, I am simply using the contemporary events to confuse and to "disinform" the viewers, with the ultimate goal to recreate and enlarge, in my installation, the common feeling of disorientation which is characteristic of the historic period that we are passing through today.