Artists

Nobuyoshi Araki

One of the most prolific figures in the field of Japanese photography, Nobuyoshi Araki (b. 1940) has produced countless pictures and more than five hundred photobooks since 1970. Such an abundant body of work defies easy categorization, an endeavor made all the more challenging by Araki’s experimentation with media including collage, film, and, more recently, Polaroid instant technology. Araki’s wry, irreverent work, frequently employing sexual subject matter, has often ignited controversy and earned him a degree of notoriety. Araki entered Chiba University in 1959, majoring in photography and film.

Ricardo Barbeito

Ricardo Barbeito (1979) was born in Funchal, has a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Madeira and a master’s degree in art and Heritage, which included the ephemeral public art project entitled The Chit-Chat: an aesthetic-artistic intervention project for the city of Funchal, where art emerges as a possibility of change in public space and the public as a factor of change in the space of art. Besides his teaching activities, Barbeito develops his work between drawing, installation and public art, deepening the connection that exists between memory and everyday life, art, life and identity. He uses a diversity of means and modes of operation in which the space and the mediations that are established in it are simultaneously matter and content of the work, exploring the place as a field of possibilities, passages and contaminations. Has been presenting his artistic work on a regular basis, in collective or individual exhibitions since 2004.

David Casini

David Casini, visual artist, works with sculpture and installation. He has exhibited in solo shows at CAR DRDE (Bologna), Plutschow Gallery (Zurich), MAR Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Ravenna), Analix Forever (Geneva), T293 (Naples). He has participated in important group shows including Le Voyageur, l’Obstacle, la Grâce, Centre d’art contemporain de Briançon (France) curated by Akim Pasquet; Panorama. Approdi e derive del paesaggio in Italia Fondazione del Monte Bologne curated by Claudio Musso; Exodus Station curated by Marta Jecu at Museum Carlos Machado, Ponta Delgada, Azores; Ripensare il medium – Il fantasma del disegno, Casa Masaccio Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, S. Giovanni V.no (Italy) curated by Saretto Cincinelli and Cristiana Collu; the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art curated by Adelina von Fürstenberg; Oceanomania at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco curated by Mark Dion; The Mediterranean Approach (Palazzo Zenobio, Venice; Museum of Contemporary Art, Marseille, SESC Pinheiros, Sao Paulo). He won the Talent Prize in 2009.

Matteo Di Ciommo

Matteo Di Ciommo (1987) lives and work in Milan. His work focuses on the narrative potential of everyday objects. He works only through unique pieces collected in small collections. He exhibited his collection “Chimney ” in a solo show in Milan in 2019 and in 2020 he was selected by elledecor among the 30 young designers to follow. In 2021 he is selected among the 10 finalists of the cramum award and of the Creative Challenge in Pietrasanta. In 2022 He has his first exhibition in Lisbona at the Cabanamad gallery. In 2022 he is selected among the 10 finalists of the Lissone design award. In March 2023 He has been selected among the 20 european talents for the magazine AD.

DEAN COATES

Dean Coates was born in 1968, Bristol, UK studied Earth Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. After graduating he worked as a technician at a brick manufacturing plant where he learned handmade and mass production techniques used to produce bricks and architectural terracotta. After a few years working in manufacturing, he trained to be a teacher and subsequently taught at a college for many years before returning to study his passion for ceramics at Cardiff University obtaining a distinction Masters of Art, Ceramics. He lives and works in Bristol, UK

Marcel Dzama

Marcel Dzama is a contemporary artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada who currently lives and works in New York city.His work has been exhibited internationally, in particular his ink and watercolor drawings. Dzama works extensively in sculpture, painting, collage, and film. The artist is also known for his intricate dioramas and large scale polyptychs that draw from his talents across a range of media.Dzama works in multiple disciplines to bring his cast of human figures, animals, and imaginary hybrids to life, and has developed an international reputation and following for his art that depicts fanciful, anachronistic worlds.The artist is also known for his work with The Royal Art Lodge.

Corpo Atelier

Corpo is an architecture & art atelier focused on the exploration and expansion of the architectural anatomy. Architectural anatomy, much like human anatomy, is a collage of different fundamental elements. There is a limited number of elements, each performing a specific function in the composition: structure and bones support the bodies, walls and skin create boundaries, windows and eyes, doors and mouth perforate the established boundary to allow the inside and the outside to communicate in different ways. While there are many similarities between these artificial and organic bodies, we can say the main difference is the possibility to expand their potential. By not being physiologically restricted to a biological law of development, architectural elements are an open field for perpetual experimentation.

CRISTINA FIORENZA

Cristina was born in Naples, Italy. During her artistic development she was always a scrupulous observer of the social dynamics of art, who, in her artistic practice, has always combined countless techniques in a very free way. In most of the media which Cristina Fiorenza interacted with, the material always assumed an essential role, but it´s in the working process of ceramics that the material found its maximum expression in the artist’s poetics. More specifically, the progressive approach to ceramic processing brought the artist closer to the sculptural language, leading her to explore new possibilities for handling raw materials. But it is thanks to the intuition of redefining part of the technical principles of traditional ceramic processing, such as firing and the use of glazes in firing, that Cristina Fiorenza’s ceramic artifacts acquire a valuable particularity. The artist works with clays, obtaining objects with rough surfaces, which are covered with different layers of particular enamel; in response to multiple firings and depending on the project, this glaze can take on the appearance of bubbles or craters. The work, which could seem formally finished, becomes something else, precisely because of the crumbling process of the glazes, which marks new aesthetic interweaving on the surfaces.

Jacopo Foggini

Jacopo Foggini was born in Turin and currently lives and works in Milan. He explores art and design crossing the boundaries imposed by the conventions of those disciplines. Jacopo joins really early the family business where he discovers the versatility of the methacrylate, an industrial material normally used in automotive design. His first experimentation with this material date back to the beginning of the nineties, when he starts using a machine of his own invention that heats the methacrylate up to 200 degrees Celsius, producing a filament that he models with his hands to create luminous shapes, monumental works and mazes of threads in an elegant intertwining of colors. Jacopo’s first solo exhibition was held in 1997 inside the space of his long time friend Romeo Gigli, and since then he exhibited in more then sixty galleries and venues throughout the world. Jacopo’s work include also important installations in renewed hotel, restaurant, showrooms and theatres, besides site specific projects for private houses and collectors.

Giovanni De Francesco

Giovanni De Francesco, artista plástico envolvido no âmbito escultórico da instalação através do uso de materiais plásticos, fotografia e pintura. Participou em inúmeras exposições individuais e coletivas desde 1997.
Membro honorário do Atelier dell’Errore e assistente na direção artística para a concepção e implementação de projetos de exposições e performances. Membro fundador da companhia de teatro Monstera para quem criava cenografia e figurinos. Artista e colaborador da Galeria Luisa delle Piane de Milão e de alguns projetos de Andrea Branzi.

Alessandro Di Giampietro

Alessandro Di Giampietro, 1972 work and live in Ljubljana / Milan/Pescara His work springs from the observation of human identity and focuses on the multilayered personae delivered in today’s society. It explores human rituals and practices around the body and the games people play that induce a changeover from one iconic archetype to another. Each work is an attempt to reconstruct a performance in which the border between reality and fiction vacillates just as when human beings are under the spell of habitual social behaviour.His work focuses mainly on portraits because he is fascinated about the unspoken negotiations each human being enacts with himself/herself in order to emote. The monsters that live in the expressive world of Alessandro’s work are growing continuosly and are some sort of living organism that keeps to proliferate (transforming from reality into installatons, photos, videos, performance and the web).

Duccio Maria Gambi

His work is heterogeneous as heterogeneous is the wide path he explored before opening his studio and workshop in Paris in 2012. He has a strong theoretical background built during his studies in the Radical Movement environment of Florence and during his years studying interior design in Milan. He is aware of both the industrial and artisanal constraints and potentials thanks to his working experiences in design studios and artisan’s workshops. In particular, he mastered a variety of creative production processes, in a wide range of scales, during a fundamental yearlong experience working at Atelier Van Lieshout in Rotterdam. His work, often focused on concrete casting and experimentation, goes from bespoke furniture pieces for private clients to research led one-off designs for design galleries as well as site specific interventions.

Daniele Giannetti

BA Interior and Product Design, Accademia Italiana, 2011; BA Product Design, Central Saint Martins, 2015. In the work De Architectura, Vitruvius talks about sounding vessels (Echea) that were used in theatres in Rome and Greece to augment their acoustics. Similar vessels dating to the Middle Ages have been found all over Europe, especially in Britain and northern France, inside the walls of churches. This is a proposal for an “acoustic land art” structure—a study of the vessel and an immersive installation: the public is invited to make sound inside the structure and play with the resonance of the vases.

Julien Gallardeaux de Gomes

He started learning classical painting from a young age, and later he was able to experiment on new techniques, optimizing my vision of painting and art, also going through the field of sculpture and installation. – At the age of 18, he entered the Superior School of Art and Design (ESAD), in Caldas da Rainha, where he was able to experiment with multiple new techniques, and where he optimized his vision of painting and art, having also worked in the field of sculpture and installation. . At 21, he moved to Italy, through the ERASMUS program, to the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, where he practiced almost exclusively painting and drawing, responding to the more classical character of the institution. Currently, he works solely in drawing and painting as a means of livelihood, with portraits as his specialty.

Paolo Gonzato

His research, starting from art, ranges from design, to publishing, to fashion, merging them in a constant dialogue. He has always been interested in the concept of extended art, has developed special projects and collaborations with companies such as CREED for high perfumery or RENAULT by customizing an electric vehicle rather than capsule collections for the fashion sector. In artistic dress, her work is part of numerous private and public collections

Francesca Iovene

Francesca Iovene is a photographer with an architectural background who lives between Berlin and Milan. After completing her MSc in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano, she devoted herself to documentary photography, with a keen eye for places’ intimacy. She works on both personal research and commissioned projects, her pictures are regularly published on the major photography, architecture and design magazines. Iovene’s work was exhibited in galleries and institution such as Triennale di Milano, Riaperture Photofestival Ferrara and Forte Malatesta in Ascoli Piceno. In 2020 she received an assignment from Sagep Editori to portray modern architecture in Genoa, and in 2021 she was selected by ICCD (Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation – an institution of the Italian Ministry for Culture) to document the cultural heritage in the South of Italy. In the last years Francesca had the chance to hold lectures about her work at Politecnico di Milano and she lived one year in Chile where she started an on-going project in the Atacama Desert.

Marianne 3.0

Marianne 3.0 arises from the urgency of affirming the being he represents, addressing the exponent of gender identity. The songs report a livingness/ experience of simply being, in a single text divided by several songs and scores, representing the process of imminence for the release of Marianne’s body in society, through music, visuals, installation and performance, which complete this new chapter in his process, are “the cry” for this need. In music, it aims to find its own musical identity, focusing on the concepts of improvisation and performance in the contents it presents. Visual performance is always present in his performances, creating a sense of immersion among the audience through the music he presents. This visual/musical union for Marianne is fundamental, since it transmits a message directly to the public, not only with his texts but with the aesthetics it aims to achieve.

Thomas Mendonça

Thomas Mendonça is a visual artist graduated at ESAD.Cr. He lives and works in Lisbon. He participated in the exhibitions “Poríferos Preciosos” at Museu Geológico de Lisboa, “I only study clinical analysis after we make love.” at Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, “Género na Arte: Corpo, sexualidade, identidade, resistência” at Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado. Among others, he also curated the exhibitions “O Vírus” and “Sem Receio De Criar O Caos” for the 22nd and 23rd editions of Internacional Film Festival Queer Lisboa, His main interests are spread among sentimental melodramas, post-pop culture and the beauty of iconic singularity in general.

Monica Menez

Monica Menez is an award-winning fashion photographer and filmmaker from Stuttgart, Germany. Whether she is working on a photoset or a fashion movie: Her rich imagery is profound and peppered with bits of absurdity, humor and eroticism. Thus, she fulfills her artistic intention to present fashion in an appealing and unique way. After having won various awards for her photographs, she received the La Jolla Fashion Film Award in 2011 for “Most Creative Concept”, followed by the ASVOFF 5 Award in 2012 for “Best Art Direction”. In 2013, she won further prestigious awards such as the Berlin Fashion Film Festival 2013 Award in the category “Best Fashion Film 2013” for her film “Odditory”, and for her film “Hors D’Oeuvre” she was rewarded with the Madrid Fashion Film Festival 2013 award for “Best fashion film international 2013”.

Carlos Mota

Carlos Mota, born in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, graduated in Interior Architecture at CAD – Centre des Arts Décoratifs and Painting at École des Arts D’lxelles in Brussels, Belgium. He currently lives and works in Lisbon. Since 1993, Mota frequently does solo and collective exhibitions both nationally and internationally. His work has been showcased in both public and private collections in various countries, such as: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Mexico, USA, Canada and Brazil.

Lucas Munõz Munõz

Lucas Muñoz Muñoz is a Spanish designer, artist and craft traveler based between the Netherlands and Spain. His practice explores redefinitions of the functionality and materiality of use-objects, spaces and engineering. Working out with his hands a field that intertwines the need for use of our daily-life artefacts with the capacity they have to carry and embody meaning from an creative and critical approach.

Matteo Pelegrino

Matteo Pellegrino is an Italian visual artist and designer. Raised in Lecce he moved to Milan in 2001 and attended the Politecnico of Milan. He started to work early during university, and since then he gained lot of experiences among companies and design studios, passing between designing processes, commercial involvement, and production processes management. His passion for materials moves Matteo to focus his research on processes of production and techniques, working as developer and freelancer project manager for companies and design studios. Since 2018 besides his activity as designer and project manager he is relator for product design course at IED.

RAFAEL PEREZ

Rafael “Rafa” Pérez was born in Haro, La Rioja, Spain, in 1957. He originally studied economics but later decided to be an artist and has pursued this career ever since. His work is about surprising himself and his audience, using white porcelain and black earthenware clay, fired at high temperature. The black earthenware expands, creating a volcanic landscape—not just a natural landscape, because it is directed by him. When he opens the kiln and doesn’t recognize the pieces as his own, he enjoys the surprise, and loves the way the fire appears to leave bits of itself behind in the finished products: the glaze looks like paint still clinging to the walls of a burned house. Rafael has held numerous exhibitions and won numerous awards internationally. In 2007, he was elected to the International Academy of Ceramics and is a member of Art Axis. He currently lives in a small Spanish city famous for its wine and recently became a grandfather.

Marta Pombo

(b.1990, Lisbon) In 2016 she completed the master’s degree in Art at École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon after the graduation in arts from the Esad.cr. Collage is a constant practice in her work. It starts with an obsessive collection of images and other found materials, creating bodylikes that reveal their inner selves through their appearance. They might tell us about their love, loneliness, oppression, passiveness, in an either delicate or ironic and humorous way. You can’t always make a separation between delicate and ironic. It’s a poetical, sensitive and mean work that hits where it hurts.

Baltasar Portillo

Baltasar Portillo, born in San Salvador in 1967. It was in his home environment that Baltasar started to have his first memories of furniture. Since then, Baltasar just grew his interest of the intersection of Art and Function, developing sculptural furniture is his tool to explore this idea. This intersection of art and design is narrowed, like an art piece. Just as a sculptor chooses a medium to create a work, a maker chooses his, in his case, it is metal hand built in the studio.

Gabriel Ribeiro

Gabriel Ribeiro was born in 1990 in Rio de Janeiro, grew up in Brazil and obtained a BA in Fine Art Practice at the Chelsea School of Arts and Design in London and a Masters in Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon.
His practice oscillates at the intersection of photography, video and sculpture, as a way of exploring the countless discursive possibilities of the subject. He currently lives and works in Lisbon, where he also completed the MAUMAUS International Study Programme. Ribeiro has recently participated in exhibitions, namely: Caring Is Sharing, CabanaMad ( Lisbon, 2022). Crack The Egg, Cordoaria Nacional (Lisbon, 2022). Dream Sequence, MAD (Lisbon, 2022). Suitcase Studies, SWAB, 2022 (Barcelona, 2022).QUENCH (individual exhibition), Duplex (Lisbon, 2022). A Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back, SWAB (Barcelona, 2021). Concrete and Private, Casa do Capitão (Lisbon, 2021). Reflections on Space, Galeria Útero (Lisbon, 2021), among others. Ribeiro also participated in residencies internationally, namely: Schiesslhaus AIR, Kollnburg (Germany, 2022). GlogauAIR, Berlin (Germany, 2022). CO-Residency, Online/Singapore (2020). Residency 108, Germantown (NY, USA, 2019). He received the Espronceda Institute Residency Award in 2022 and the Millennium Foundation Young Artists Award in 2021.

Fabio Ricciardiello

The artistic and existential journey of Fabio Ricciardiello starts with a prologue and a development which, to geography, have assigned a leading role. Born in Naples, Ricciardiello grew up in a dense atmosphere of Neapolitan magic, he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, under the aegis, among others, of Massimo Bignardi. The years in the Academy mark a time with a multidisciplinary approach, in which, in particular, sculpture proves to be a medium capable of bringing out the lyrical action from the processing of the material, with which Ricciardiello starts the first steps of his first exhibition season If one wanted to trace a map of the path taken so far by Fabio Ricciardiello, certainly, the common thread would be unraveled by a multiple, composite language, in which different languages dialogue harmoniously: sculpture and photography first of all, painting, illustration and design immediately afterwards.

Emmanuelle Roule

Emmanuelle Roule founded her studio in 2007 in Paris. Curious about new projects and encounters, the studio is characterised by a multidisciplinary dimension : design, art direction, space and contemporary art. Experimentation, research and fun.

Jan Saudek

Jan Saudek was born in Prague on May 13, 1935. He worked in various departments of the State Printing Works from 1950 through 1970, and started making his own photographs in 1951. He began to hand paint his images in 1977. Saudek’s pictures display a fondness for sequences that can be traced back to his childhood appreciation of comic books. More obviously, his work is often inspired by the nineteenth century tradition of photographs of large women posed in lingerie reproduced as postcards (quite possibly also the source of inspiration for Saudek’s collection 30 Postcards). His formal training occurred from 1950 to 1952, when Saudek attended Graphic Arts school and took a photography class. Saudek first exhibited in Prague in 1963 at the Hall of the Theatre on the Balustrade.

Antonino Sciortino

Antonino Sciortino was born in Palermo. When he was just eight years old, he began to forge iron in his father’s studio. Now all his designs are reminiscent of sculptures, and through their artistic finishing touches (painted with brushes and polished), they preserve the soul that Antonino aimed to give them. .

Studio B Severin

Studio b severin is a Berlin based design studio, run by the German-French duo Birgit Severin and Guillaume Neu-Rinaudo. The designers follow a holistic approach seeing objects as extensions of body and mind. Re-designing processes and our material world, they aim to contribute towards a more social and sustainable society. Based on their research in Japan and inspired by the art born out of Zen Buddhism. .

SOFTROCK

SOFTROCK is about what is seen and what is hidden. An independent family project, which plays with the limits of reality by questioning its shapes and contours. By recreating and re-imagining rock, João Parrinha’s work explores the way in which nature avoids the straight line and, therefore, the power that materiality has to express paradox. Inspired by organic contours, the objects he creates reproduce the feeling of immersion in what is natural, transforming the space they inhabit and drawing new possibilities for the idea of comfort.

JESUS RAFAEL SOTO

Jesús Rafael Soto (June 5, 1923 – January 17, 2005) was a Venezuelan op and kinetic artist, a sculptor and a painter.His works can be found in the collections of the main museums of the world, including Tate (London), Museum Ludwig (Germany), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Roma) and MoMA (New York). One of the main museums of art in Venezuela, in his home town, has his name in tribute to him.

FRANCISCO TRÊPA

His work is developed through a transdisciplinary practice, applying methods that materialize an approach between sculpture, video, photography, painting and drawing.

He often explores strategies to make visible articulations produced between the human animal / non-human animal, which evoke ideas of conquest and enclosure perceived through social structures, industrial products and concepts.

Meanings embedded in materials, commercial products and objects, operate within the conceptual structure of his practice. He is interested, from a heterogeneous perspective, in the creation and representation of crossed and tangent paths between formalism and the vulnerable impulse, culminating, with humor and seriousness, in a feedback process between research and practice, thus creating a particular micro-universe that serves as a bridge between the works he idealizes and creates.

KAJA UPELJ

Kaja Upelj’s practice derives from altering the individual’s experience of glass. Reshaping our perception of the material through capturing and conveying glass in its most fundamental essence and the impression of fluidity. Oscillation of luminous and iridescence in artist’s work indicates a duality of our perception of the surroundings, evoking a question of our experience and understanding of the world.

Carvalho Ventura

Rute de Carvalho Magalhães is a photographer and has dedicated her professional life to the visual arts. In 2007 she began his photography work in various types of historical or alternative photographic processes,such as cyanotype, bi-chromated gum or wet collodion. In 2011 she did photography training at ar.co in Lisbon, and the following year he did another one on Colossus Dank with Quinn Jacobson at the Center Iris in Paris.

ALESSANDRO ZAMBELLI

Alessandro Zambelli studied industrial design and materials engineering at the Cova School of Design in Milan, and his career took off in 2000. After several years in Milan, he choose the Mantua countryside as a place to live and work: a territory rich in history, in references and atmosphere that is a continual inspiration for his work. The design work of Alessandro Zambelli speaks a new language – imaginary and real at the same time – maintaining and rediscovering the memory of a deep-seated remembrance: from which “sensitive objects”, are born, enveloped in a subtle irony and capable of embodying powerful poetic traits, which leads to very simple gestures and sensations that are familiar to us; objects that can establish a dialogue with those who choose them, each time creating different narratives, sometimes surprising and unexpected. The designs of Alessandro Zambelli are industrial productions or manual experiments: two different types of approach that converge in the same design philosophy, where often one intersects another and vice-versa; they have attained numerous awards, including the European Consumer Choice 2011, the NYIGF Award 2012, the ADI Award for Innovation 2014, the Interior Innovation Award 2015 and the Premio dei Premi 2015, established by the President of the Italian Republic. The designer has exhibited his work in Europe, USA, China, Korea and Japan.

ZIETA

Zieta Studio is a multidisciplinary team of architects, designers, engineers and technologists. They design processes, whose outcomes are out-of-ordinary and uncompromising collections of fabulous abstract objects, public sculptures and functional collectable forms that deceive senses with their unusual shapes and qualities. Extensive research and experiments with metals lead us to achieve unpredictable results and uncover forms that are real but out of this world. At Zieta hey aim to create objects with the best possible synergy between design and technology. Inflated steel furniture, mirrors and accessories are made with FiDU technology – our original patented method of transforming metal sheets into tridimensional objects.