GIANANTONIO ABATE - Everything is Illuminated

Gianantonio Abate is an Italian artist who began exhibiting in the 80’s, gaining notoriety with the group known as the New Futurists. His first post-modern works focused on contamination and linguistic fragmentation.

Soon after the New Futurists experience, he began a journey towards a more intimate research that led to a form of "digital" painting.

Over time Abate realized that the computer medium performed like a screen, a sort of cold mental filter. To create a balance between conceptual structures and his instinctive nature, he shifted his research toward painting: as the medium par excellence, coming from a millennial tradition, it guarantees a "universal" anthropological experience.

There is a need in Abate’s work for a precise painting, made of light, shape, color, rhythm, where beauty and wonder emerge in a gentle and harmonious way. Alternating dazzling hallucinations and existential dramas, his art has increasingly oriented towards a more spiritual dimension, in search of a self-consciousness that our contemporary world seems to have lost.

His paintings recall the works of the old masters, for which the paintings were a product of patience and meditation.

The artist spontaneously moves toward that particular attitude that Nicola Vitale called "sunshine" in his seminal essay Solar Figures.

Abate has exhibited in various public venues, including: Groninger Museum, Groningen; Rotonda della Besana, Milan; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover; Bregenz Kunstverein, Bregenz; Kunstverein Wien, Vienna; Castello di Rivara, Rivara; Bologna Gallery of Modern Art; Venice Biennale; Quadrennial of Rome; Italian Institute of Culture, Madrid; Italian Cultural Institute, Barcelona; Municipal Art Gallery, Ravenna; Palazzo Guasco, Alexandria; Castello di Volpaia, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua; XVIII Milan Triennale; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; XXXII Biennale di Milano; Palazzo delle Albere, Trento; Museo Depero, Rovereto; Museum of Modern Art, San Marino; Museo d'Arte Urbana Capitol; Turin, National Gallery of Modern Art, Turin, Spazio Oberdan in Milan.

The exhibition will be open from May 5 to July 30, 2016, from 10:00am to 6:00pm

An opening reception will be held on Tuesday, May 17, from 6:00-8:00pm