The main new feature of the 2020 edition is Pittura XXI, a brand new feature for art fairs and not only in Italy.
For the first time a fair will focus its attention on painting, one of the most debated contemporary art forms, with the aim of providing an overview of the emerging talents and mid-career artists, at a national and international level.
The curator of this section is Davide Ferri, independent art critic and curator widely esteemed for his knowledge of the medium.
Underlining the substantial interest in this new section is the participation of foreign galleries such as Bernhard Knaus, Frankfurt, and Arcade, London.
"In a compact and limited space in the fair, Pittura XXI will attempt to point out a number of guiding threads in research conducted by recent generations of painters. At the centre of the section are a few of the possible paths of contemporary figurative painting: a move toward representation that seems to arise momentarily from a sort of abstract magma or, just the opposite, from an abstraction that implies a figurative grammar; the proposal of an agile, even impudent representation that superimposes past forms and models (even the one preceding the Avant-garde) on pop images; at the opposite end: minimum, reflective, inevitably metalinguistic representation.
Pittura XXI includes works by 30 mid-career artists (many from abroad) who began painting in the early 2000s and are presented by about 20 galleries. The section highlights the work of artists who in recent years (especially in Italy) have developed a movement in which painting plays a leading role"
(Davide Ferri)
1/9UNOSUNOVE (artists: Simon Callery, Jonathan Vandyke) Roma; A+B GALLERY (Markus Saile) Brescia; ARCADE (John Finneran) London; BERNHARD KNAUS FINE ART (Giacomo Santiago Rogado, Karim Noureldin) Frankfurt am Main; BOCCANERA (Nebojša Despotović, Andrea Fontanari) Trento, Milano; CAR DRDE (Damien Meade) Bologna; CARDELLI & FONTANA (Mirko Baricchi, Beatrice Meoni) Sarzana (SP); MONICA DE CARDENAS (Gianluca Di Pasquale, Ivan Seal) Milano; EX ELETTROFONICA (Federico Pietrella, Pesce Khete) Roma; FRANCESCA ANTONINI (Guglielmo Castelli), Roma; GALLERIA FUORICAMPO (Eugenia Vanni, Michele Tocca) Siena; MONITOR (Peter Linde Busk, Matteo Fato) Roma, Lisboa, Pereto (AQ); NORMA MANGIONE (Michael Bauer) Torino; P420 (Adelaide Cioni) Bologna; PINKSUMMER (Jorge Queiroz) Genova; RIBOT (Jonathan Lux) Milano; EDUARDO SECCI (Chris Hood, Pierre Knop) Firenze; THE GALLERY APART (Corinna Gosmaro, Alessandro Scarabello) Roma; LUCA TOMMASI (Phillip Allen, Mark Francis) Milano