The Ballroom, 2016
Federico Solmi (Italy, 1973) currently lives and works in New York. His exhibitions, which often combine articulate installations composed of different media such as video, drawings, and paintings, use bright colors and a satirical aesthetic to portray a dystopian vision of our present-day society. Solmi exploits emerging technologies to reveal the hypocrisies in contemporary society, making art with political and social commentary as a means to disrupt the power structure of our technological age. Scanning his paintings into a game engine, Solmi confronts the audience with his own absurd rewriting of past and present-day events. Solmi stages a virtual world where our leaders become puppets, animated by computer scripts rather than strings.
In the year 2009, Federico Solmi was awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation of New York with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in the category of Video & Audio. Federico Solmi is currently visiting Professor at Yale University School of Drama, New Haven, CT. His work has been included in several international Biennials, including Open Spaces 2018: A Kansas City Arts Experience(2018), the Beijing Media Art Biennale (2016), Frankfurt B3 Biennial of the Moving Image (2017-2015), the First Shenzhen Animation Biennial in China (2013), the 54th Venice Biennial (2011), and the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in New Mexico (2010). Solmi has been featured in solo museum exhibitions including Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, NY (2018), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo del Zulia, Maracaibo, Venezuela (2017), the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel (2016), the Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2015), and the Italian Cultural Institute of Madrid, Spain (2013).
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Mar 06 – Mar 09, 2019 Federico Solmi Counterfeit Heroes
Jun 11 – Aug 23, 2018 Group Show Reprise: Summer Show 2018
May 23 – Aug 17, 2017 Group Show Art on the Front Lines
See All Exhibitions
The Great Farce Carousel (excerpt)
The Great Farce (excerpt)
The Holy Master (excerpt)
The Grand Masquerade, 2018
The Kindhearted Charlatans, 2018
The Great Expedition, 2018
The Esteemed Scoundrel, 2017
The Divine Emperor, 2017
The Gracious Conquistadors, 2017
The Decadent, 2016
The Magnificent Exploiter, 2016
The Great Patriot, 2016
The Brotherhood Triptych, Panel 2, 2015
Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth video edition box, 2012
Untitled still from Douche Bag City, 2010
Untitled still from The Evil Empire, 2007
Untitled Still from King Kong and the End of the World, 2006
The Good Samaritans, 2018
The Great Farce, 2017
The Brotherhood, 2017
Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth, 2015
Douche Bag City, 2010
The Evil Empire, 2008
King Kong and the End of the World, 2006
Ideal City, 2004
Other Gallery Artists
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