Federico Solmi
Federico Solmi’s exhibitions, which often combine articulate installations composed of different media such as video, drawings, mechanical sculptures and paintings, use bright colours and a satirical aesthetic to portray a dystopian vision of our present day society. Irreverent, surrealistic, the videos and the works by Solmi are as he is: extravagant, rowdy and ironic. They are satires about the evilness and the vices that affect contemporary society and mankind. 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. The universe that Solmi likes to represent is the exaltation of a present that is crumbling apart. His work is a criticism of a system that approves and trusts without questioning the fragile foundation on which our culture and post-modernist society is based.
Solmi currently lives and works in New York. His works has been exhibited in solo and group shows in different museums and institutions for Contemporary Art, like Centre Pompidou and Palais De Tokyo, Paris; Reina Sofia National Museum and CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Drawing Center, New York; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Arts, Herzliya (Israel) and OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai. In 2009, Federico Solmi was awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation in New York with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in the category Video & Audio. Federico Solmi has given lectures on his work in several Universities and Art Schools in the United States and Europe, including Yale University and Accademia di Brera in Milan.
