BOLOGNA.- Arte Fiera announced the list of galleries participating at its 44th edition, which will take place in Bologna from January 24 to 26, 2020, in halls 15 and 18 (VIP preview and vernissage on Thursday, January 23). For the second consecutive year, the artistic director is Simone Menegoi and Arte Fiera will continue its innovation mission, started with the successful 2019 edition, confirming its international calling but with a strong emphasis on Italian art from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Together with the Main Section, there will be three sections by invitation only. One of them is Photography and Moving Images, launched in 2019: a showcase dedicated to video and photography, the media that, more than any other, shape our daily visual horizon. They will be considered by themselves and in dialogue with contemporary art languages. The section will be again entrusted to Fantom, the curatorial platform born in 2009 between Milan and New York thanks to Selva Barni, Ilaria Speri, Massimo Torrigiani and Francesco Zanot.
The main new feature of the 2020 edition is Pittura XXI, a section entirely dedicated to new millennium painting. For the first time, the fair will focus on one of the most debated contemporary art forms, with the aim of providing an overview of the emerging talents and mid-career artists, at a national and international level. The curator of this section is Davide Ferri, Italian art critic and curator with a substantial record of exhibitions and publications regarding this medium.
The third and last curated section is called Focus, and will be dedicated to artworks which will examine the art from the first half of the 20th century and to Post-War Masters. Every year this section will be assigned to a different curator; for this debut edition Laura Cherubini, art historian and critic of great renown, has been selected. Cherubini has chosen to concentrate on innovation and revolutions in Italian painting between the end of the 1950s and the end of the 1970s.
During Arte Fiera 2020 the second chapter of Courtesy Emilia-Romagna, a series of exhibitions engaging public and private institutional collections from the region, will take place. This format involves a temporary exhibition inside the fair, as an opportunity to get to know and appreciate an artistic heritage that can be described as a “scattered museum,” seen from the perspective of a curator that each year will be different. For the 2020 edition this exhibition will be curated by Eva Brioschi, art historian and critic, curator of La Gaia Collection, Busca (Cuneo). The exhibition is called L’opera aperta (The Open Work).
Also returning for the second time is OPLA’ – Performing Activities, a project curated by Silvia Fanti (Xing), well known in Italy and abroad for her strong interest in cutting-edge experiences in the field of live arts. Arte Fiera will proudly present performative interventions by Alessandro Bosetti, Luca Vitone, Zapruder filmmakersgroup and Jimmie Durham, the artist awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Eva Marisaldi is the artist selected and commissioned to an artwork specially made for the 2020 edition of Arte Fiera. The project, which has been in the pipeline since last spring, is called Welcome, and is composed of two parts: a large installation that visitors will encounter at the Fair entrance, and a scattered intervention in various points, in the fair halls and around Bologna.
Arte Fiera renews its close collaboration with Bologna City Council, and together they will support the eighth edition of ART CITY Bologna, a series of events and exhibitions directed by Lorenzo Balbi, Artistic Director of MAMbo, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bologna.
