Looking forward | November 2024

Von Buren Contemporary presents

LOOKING FORWARD

 Group show featuring the works of

Matteo Casali

Giuseppe Gallace

Lau_Lana

Maria Pilotto

Lucia Simone

Lorenzo Zanotti

Presentation text: Anna Gasperini

Looking forward will remain on show until January 15, 2025

Von Buren Contemporary | Via Giulia 13 | 00186 Rome

Von Buren Contemporary is proud to present LOOKING FORWARD, its latest group exhibition showcasing a young generation of emerging Italian artists and the gallery’s talent scouting activities.

The show examines the work of six artists: Matteo Casali, Giuseppe Gallace, Lau_Lana, Maria Pilotto, Lucia Simone and Lorenzo Zanotti.

Matteo Casali, born in Schio in northern Italy in 1994, holds a Master’s Degree in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Casali works mainly in oil and acrylic on canvas and his bold, startling style clearly draws on the influence of Francis Bacon as well as the Nordic Expressionists. The artist focuses on the human figure, using as his starting point photographs of family members and close friends. He creates intimate yet estranged images of his distorted subjects, exploiting the landscape to underscore the dominant mood of alienation and loneliness. Despite the potential for bleakness, Casali draws out the tenderness inherent in each of the characters he represents.

Giuseppe Gallace, born in Soverato, Calabria in 1993, is a graduate of the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin. Gallace uses both domestic interiors and outdoor settings as bases for his sparse, disquieting canvases, in which human figures and animals are often present but never explicitly represented. The predominating sensation is one of loneliness which nonetheless leaves space for a pulsating vitality. Despite the melancholic tones, Gallace manages to engage viewers in a playful, mental exercise, in which they are invited to complete the narrative and fill in the gaps in shape, colour and volume deliberately left ‘unfinished’ by the artist.

Lau_Lana was born in Jesolo near Venice in 1998 and originally studied fashion. Taught to embroider as a child by her grandmother, Lau_Lana soon realised that this ancient craft was her true passion in life. Taking inspiration from the seaside town that she grew up in, she began ‘painting’ with wool thread on canvas, recreating beach scenes where the colours, patterns and intricacies of bathing costumes, deck chairs and towels dominate the picture. Her strong connection to territory and the special attention she pays to women provide rich material for Lau_Lana as she transforms craftsmanship into art.

Maria Pilotto was born in Padua in 1996 and graduated in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. In 2022, she took part in the 59^th Venice International Art Biennale after being awarded first place in a top regional prize for young artists. Pilotto is currently focused on the creation of small, vivid watercolours on paper, taking birthday celebrations as her main theme. These rich and delicate artworks are inspired by the photographs of family and friends, and perfectly capture a fleeting moment that is at once exquisitely personal yet universal. Her subjects lack facial features, aiding the viewer’s identification with the scene and, the artist hopes, with the missing parts.

Lucia Simone, born in Perugia in 1986, is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome where she specialised in Painting and Engraving. Simone has won prizes for her emotionally charged works and has exhibited widely in galleries and museum spaces in Italy and abroad. Often taking the human figure as her subject matter, Simone injects her vibrant canvases with intense personality, creating hypnotic atmospheres which pull the observer in. She succeeds in creating a moment of shared, unguarded intimacy between the viewer and her subject, who always seems to hover on the invisible threshold separating a dream from a nightmare.

Lorenzo Zanotti was born in Bologna in 1989. Self-taught, he discovered painting thanks to his grandfather and turned it into his profession, creating works that stand out for their expressionist rawness and emotional crudity.  At the heart of his artistic research is the human figure, or rather the human condition, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as: ”The state or condition of being human, especially regarded as being inherently problematic or flawed”. For the artist, this imperfection is depicted via a sense of solitude and apprehension in his unsettling canvases where mask-like faces heighten the psychological drama of his vivid subjects.

LOOKING FORWARD is a celebration not only of the imagination and creativity of these six gifted artists but also of gallery owner Michele von Büren’s ability to spot and nurture young talent – a capacity which is critical her gallery’s continued and growing success.