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BG ArTalent

BG ArTalent

We support in the forefront the world of art and culture

Banca Generali returns to the side of contemporary art in the promotion of Milan Art Week 2023 and the growth of the BG ArTalent project dedicated to the most interesting Italian artists on the global scene.

For the fifth consecutive year, the private bank will be the main sponsor of the event scheduled from April 11 to 16, organized by the City of Milan, making itself the promoter of a particularly heartfelt and long-awaited initiative by the public: the free all-day opening of the Museo del '900 on Saturday, April 15.

BG Art Talent

BG ArTalent aims to support Italian art and enhance talent in its various expressions. This is the context for the recent purchase of the works by Pessoli and Di Massimo, which are on display at the Piazza Sant'Alessandro office, where an itinerary is available that brings together the main works from Banca Generali's collection, which includes masters of contemporary art such as Farhan Siki, Mario Arlati, Rolando Raggenbass and Luca Marcionelli.

Read on to find out more about the artists' biographies, the works on display, and the days and hours they are open to the public.

Alessandro Pessoli in "The Justice" (2021)

Alessandro Pessoli born in Cervia in 1963, now lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at major institutions in Italy and abroad.

In more than 30 years of work, a body of outstanding works that testifies to a deep-rooted belief in the possibilities of painting and its drifts into other expressive media. Fusing pop culture and contemporary imagery with references to art history and Italian tradition, Alessandro Pessoli has constructed a dreamlike universe inhabited by eccentric characters in which styles and forms of the past are revisited and reinterpreted in metamorphic and surreal iconographic typologies.

The Justice (2021)

This is a new series of paintings in which Pessoli seeks a balance between drawing and painting, between the lightness of the sign that quickly hints at forms and the dense layering of memories typical of painting. They are imaginary portraits of male and female figures, whose classical pose recalls Disney characters on the one hand and illustrations for William Blake's Divine Comedy on the other.

Flowers, apples, birds, skulls, swords, snakes, wings and claws accompany and characterize these characters.

The iconography, though imaginative and visionary, belongs to Western art history: Adam and Eve, The Expulsion from Paradise, Isolation, Temptation, the Fall and Rebirth. Angels and devils take the form of young teengeers and vice versa. Snakes, as seen in the Justice, turn into funny comix worms surrounding the figure, and there is no drama but fun and play.

The figures are both portrayed against a background deliberately left white: there is no setting but a light that makes everything legible, obvious, from the smallest pencil mark to the dense splash of color. The figures are also contained within a frame with rounded corners that delimits their space. This frame has several functions; it is a threshold from which the figures appear, a theatrical backdrop that channels the gaze within this symbolic space, and the shape of the smartphone with images scrolling on Instagram.

Finally, the paintings bear under the figures their respective titles, and this creates an association with tarot cards, where the images of men and women are symbols representing the ups and downs of life, those highs and lows that mark its path, and as in tarot cards remind us that everything is constantly changing.

Patrizio di Massimo in "Self Portrait" (2022)

Patrizio Di Massimo, born in 1983 in Jesi, now lives and works in London, where he graduated from the Slade School of Art. He has had solo exhibitions at major national and international galleries and museums.

Self Portrait (2022)

The painting continues the series of portraits of sleeping people that Di Massimo began in 2021. In this work, the artist focuses on himself, alone and dozing between green-colored sheets in the company of only one elective character.

Resting on the blankets is in fact the book "I paint what I want to see" by American painter Philip Guston.

Patrizio di Massimo is very often the subject of his own paintings, and about his self-portraits he said that "self-portraiture is accomplished when there is a personal involvement. Basically, my painting is a story about me. I myself, alone in the studio, model myself.

Each painting is a psychoanalytic session, and what I do is to lay myself bare before the audience." Such an operation of laying bare is shaped by references to the history of painting, a history that Di Massimo freely reinterprets.

Marco Bernardi, Deputy General Manager Commercial Networks & Alternative and Support Channels

 

We are happy to return alongside the City of Milan in what we consider one of the most important initiatives for the promotion of art to the general public in our country. Milano Art Week is an extraordinary showcase that anticipates MiArt by bringing the gaze not only of operators but of all art lovers to our city, and for this reason we are honored to support its dissemination and communication. As a reality close to innovation and cultural exchange in art, the bank presents its own collection, encapsulated in the BG ArTalent project, which today counts on very interesting original works by seven internationally recognized artists who contribute to carrying the flag of Italian genius around the world.