[Press Realease]

Original, versatile and innovative, this year the OPEN International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations reaches its eighth edition, celebrating the demanding work of transmitting cultures belonging to heterogeneous artistic environments. The vocation of OPEN, resulting from an idea of Paolo De Grandis, has brought the most important representatives of contemporary art to Venice Lido, among them Yoko Ono, Marisa Merz, Emilio Vedova, Richard Long, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Bernar Venet, Mimmo Rotella, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Cesar, Arman, Beverly Pepper, Erik Dietman, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Carl Andre, Keith Haring, Fabrizio Plessi, Julian Schnabel, Dennis Hopper, Feng Mengbo, Max Neuhaus, Chen Zhen and Ju Ming.
OPEN2OO5 is a mobile point of observation, an open window on the contemporary world, on those territories that slip and overlap, creating unusual and curious images. The art woks, exhibited along the avenues and open spaces of the cosmopolitan Lido, created in absolutely different contexts, reveal the need to probe languages freely, to pass straight across codes, taking one’s courage in both hands.
The challenge becomes even more interesting when the work of the artists springs from the meeting of Paolo De Grandis with three co-curators: Vincenzo Sanfo, Marisa Vescovo and Chang Tsong-zung.
The exhibition is jointly organised by the Department of Culture of the Venice City Council in collaboration with the Italian Centre for Arts and Culture in Turin. It is held under the patronage of the Italian Ministry of the Cultural Heritage, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Veneto Region, the Province of Venice, Venice City Council, with the support of the ministries and embassies of the participating countries. The works will be exhibited along-side the main streets (Lungomare Marconi, via Duodo), piazzas (S. Maria Elisabetta, Tempio Votivo, Lepanto), major hotels (The Westin Excelsior, Des Bains, Hungaria Palace, Villa Laguna, Le Boulevard) and the exhibition space Blue Moon.
The distinctive sign of the review is the multiple gaze that is able to indicate the numerous grades of artistic production that hover between sculpture, installation, performance and environment, through the rediscovery of contemporary Italian art. It ranges from the eclectic works of Sandro Chia to the highly coloured abstract form of Nino Mustica, right up to the luminous installations of Marco Lodola and Dario Ghibaudo. The exhibition is a pioneering operation which becomes a complex matter of forms and meanings, as in the works of Renzo Margonari, Riccardo Cordero, Omar Galliani, Anna Santinello, Bobo Ivancich de la Torriente, Ursula Huber, Luigi Masin and Silvana Scarpa. The physical sense, the fact of being proposed as an object, form the fil rouge of these works, sculptures with a great visual impact, the fruit of all-embracing activities that invade the whole setting. In a time like the present, fraught with political tensions that monopolise even the cultural sphere, crucial current affairs become a constant presence as in the art of B.Zarro who with his Trojan Horse, a real F104 fighter plane, denounces international intervention policy.
The rhapsodic exploration also includes artists who use sculpture not as a favourite means of expression, but as an intermediate stage in a discussion linked with the contrived view of the human body. And so we find polychrome bronze figures, subjected to mutations of the skin with an enamelled effect by Rabarama. Her figures – absorbed, pensive, crouching or tense – provide a key for interpreting the return to figurative art as in the bronze “Replicas” by the American artist J. Seward Johnson. His sculptures evoke a dream-like reality worthy of glossy magazines, mid-way between the strip cartoons of the Fifties and American pop culture. Historic knowledge and a taste for the bizarre are blended in his visionary style, to amuse with intelligence, among small and large surprises.
The result of a real strategy of its organisers, OPEN follows an enlarged expressive diaphragm. Hence the return to marble with the previously unshown artistic interventions of the leading exponents of contemporary art: Carol Rama, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Vettor Pisani, Nunzio, Gilberto Zorio, Aldo Mondino, Perino & Vele, Grazia Toderi, Joseph Kosuth, Stephen Antonakos, Simon Callery, Joan Fontcuberta, Gao Brothers, Marco Gastini, Susy Gomez, Nicolas Leiva, Luigi Mainolfi, Eliseo Mattiacci and David Tremlett.The engraved marble slabs, cut with rigour and translated into unprecedented visual experiments, are transformed into stories, books that convey messages, signs that speak through the strength of the marble material.
The path is articulated and complete, the artists have been carefully chosen and the space assigned to new geographical situations such as Latin America. Sebastián, of Mexican origin, is the first in the series. For the occasion he presents a body of works, part of a “work in progress”, conceived with relation to the characteristics of a space particularly rich in suggestions. His sculptures, recently shown in the major European capitals, integrate with the environment to evoke new expressive frontiers through the choice of colours and materials. The Mexicans Jose Luis Gutierrez, Diego Bodadilla, Carlos Guerriero, and the Argentinean Nicolás Leiva, though with different languages and approaches, share the same problems; in fact, a strong vital energy emanates from their works in a confrontation with the dimensions of time and space. Through the environment, objects become a residue of their original culture, bringing with them the memory of the knowledge and spirit of whoever created them. In the encounter of these artists there is the echo of the great South American moralist school - Riviera, Siqueros, Orozco - but also the mysterious charm of events and characters between epic and fairy-tale, drawn from the collective memory and effectively described by Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Faithful to a line of investigation focussed on non-western cultures, OPEN proposes the works of Yuen Minjun (CHINA), Wang Guangyi (CHINA) and Kyoji Nagatani (JAPAN). Some of the protagonists of the contemporary Asian scene are back, wavering between figurative linguistic choices and plastic developments in a symbolic mould, marked by the balanced use of the means of expression, which can be clearly traced in a coherence of patterns and ideas. Their language challenges all localist preferences, expressing a media experiment.
The encounter of individual existences in transit and of international participations gives expression to artists such as Jan van Oost (BELGIUM), Lia Lapithi Shukuroglou (CYPRUS) and Helga Elben (GERMANY). Parallel zones which, though they spring from absolute freedom of expression, unfettered by an obligatory theme, meet, infect one another and form hybrids without ever merging.
Mobility and permanence thus become two complementary factors, following the idea of a migratory flow of global artists who find temporary stopping places at OPEN where they can meet and leave traces of their work.