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 animations have been featured in some of the most prestigious events dedicated to contemporary art and his work has been exhibited in many galleries and museums around the World including Drawing Center, New York; Victoria Memorial Museum of Calcutta, India; Contemporary Art Museum of Naples, Italy; and Contemporary Art Center of Rouboix, France. In addition, his animations have been screened in several film and video festivals, as well as in established contemporary art fairs including Pulse Miami; Pulse New York; Art Brussels; Maco Mexico; Scope Art Fair, Basel; Scope Art Fair, New York; and Artissima. His work has been reviewed by publications such as Flash Art Magazine, Tema Celeste, Art Actuelle, Contemporary Magazine, ArtNet.com, il Giornale, Marie Claire, Animal Magazine, El Mundo, Exibart on Paper, JamesWagner.com, Daily News, El Pais, Il Mattino, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Roma, and Duellanti. Exibart on Paper, 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:

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.