Bologna Arte Fiera

Friday a group of professors took their classes to the Bologna Art Festival (called Art Fiera). So we rented a bus and drove almost 2 hours to get there (fyi, Italian rest-stops are a lot nicer and have better food!...and there is a section that's almost like a mini grocery store!). We drove through mountains to get there..and saw..SNOW (Bologna isn't in the mountains though, we just drove either through them or along side of them to get there). It was rather cold in Bologna, Firenze is lot warmer. I took a photograph from the bus:















After getting to the festival venue we all stood around waiting in the cold for our professors to get tickets...in that time my eyes fell upon this wonderfully dressed pimp-woman:



















This festival was insane. It was basically this huge huge HUGE convention center like place and all the large rooms were sectioned off with partitions and galleries from all over Italy, other parts of Europe and some from the US could rent a section and exhibit their artists' work. It was extremely overwhelming. I took a lot of pictures of the work I liked and wrote down names of the artists who did video work.
Artists who did videos that were awesomely funny, creepy, entertaining:

-Coniglio Viola (I think..it was hand writen and not very clearly!) - "Romantici", edition 5HD + 55D, 2007 (Tomaso Renoldi Bracco = gallery) - a family portrait of what looks like a late 1800s family but all the faces are of the same person (maybe the artist?) and they all look uncomfortable, or trying to hard to pose, or just odd - especially the young twin brothers.

-Gu Dexin - "F23", "F36", "F52", "F79", "F92" - flash animation, edition 5, 2006 (Galleria Continua) - slightly more complex stick figures doing really strange acts in groups, like chain reaction sort of acts. One person does something and the rest follow, then the last person ends it with a funny outcome...I'm not going to say more becuase that just gets into too many details I would rather not describe on the blog...if you're interested look it up yourself or email me! haha. - here is a link to on of Gu Dexin's clips but it's not one that I saw at the fair...but you get the idea of his work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRa1RgBOhMk

-Marc Horowitz (American I think) - he did a bunch of commercials for galleries. they are hilarious!! Maybe they have them somewhere online to watch. If you YouTube his name, and look up the video for Pecker Drum...they played that at the fair...I'd say it's PG13 :)
He also had a video called "The National Dinner Tour" here's the link that I found on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_jQaMVBcpI
I saw him walking into the building as I was leaving for the bus - that was cool! :)


Jacob Hashimoto (bought his cataloge from the gallery)
Untitled
paper, bamboo, acrylic paint, nylon string
107 x 74 x 20 cm
2007














Not sure of the name of this one - It was basically a whole big area of space that had all the paper/bamboo pieces suspended and coming down in layers. It was pretty cool...you could stand in it, walk around (as demonstrated in the silly picture below)

































This gallery was really busy so I couldn't get a hold of someone to tell me the artist's name but I'll look it up later at the Gallery Biagiotti website.








Details: (location in the picture above: Bottom row, second from left and Top row, first from left)























Marco Fantini
La Citta di K (and detail)
Oil paint, collage, gesso, smolto (an Italian word in the description I don't know the meaning of..will find out soon enough)
180 x 150 cm
2006-2007
another Marco Fantini (I really liked his work and saw a gallery with a cataloge and asked how much it cost and the gallery rep said "for you..FREE!" So I got a nice hardcover cataloge of Fantini's work!)