Nicola Samorì. Sfregi

This volume, published to coincide with Nicola Samorì’s first anthological exhibition in Italy on the premises of the museum of Palazzo Fava in Bologna (8 April – 25 July 2021), offers an exhaustive reading of the twenty-year career of the Bolognese artist. Samorì confronts the works of the great masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, interpreting them with the tormented spirit of our century. Through sudden and violent gestures, he transforms painting by creating new works, pregnant with the disquiet typical of contemporary expression.

The curatorial text and images tell of the artist’s desire to disturb, transgress and transfigure pre-existing images, through the use of different practices, such as piercing and scratching the canvas. His close and continuous ties with the history of art and specifically with the Baroque age, enable the artist to develop a series of evocations and similarities with the collection in the Genus Bononiae, developing a close and intense dialogue with the precious frescoes and friezes in the museum, as if vying with them, through their own “maimings”. The exhibition path and the catalogue also host more intimate but no less precious works, which allow the viewer to embrace Samorì’s extensive and complex production, the maniacal and obsessive research that has enabled him to differentiate himself from today’s artistic panorama, raising him to the honors of international criticism.

One of the most original artists of his generation and a figure who has succeeded in creating a heterodox version of art, Nicola Samorì (Forlì, 1977) has two participations in the Venice Biennale (2015, 2011). In recent years, several Italian museums have hosted his works, but the most important recognition derives from personal exhibitions abroad, in institutional spaces such as the Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art in Taiwan, the MOCAK in Kraków, the Neue Galerie in Gladbeck , the Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin and the Kunsthalle in Tübingen.