INAUGURATION TUESDAY 16 April 2024 : 6.00 p.m. - 9.30 p.m. | Via Pietro Maroncelli 13 (inside the courtyard)
EXHIBITION from 17-21 April 2024 | Continuous opening hours from 11.30 a.m. - 6.30 p.m.
Exhibition continues until 31 May 2024 - by appointment
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On 16 April, Galleria Paola Colombari in collaboration with LANIERI opens the exhibition ‘SIGNATURE ART DESIGN’ at Maroncelli Design District, during the Design Week of the Salone del Mobile 2024. A selection of new limited edition art design works and contemporary artists will be on display. The works of Brazilian designers Alê Jordão, Marcelo Bilac, Poland’s Pawel Grunert, Antonio Cagianelli, Alessandra Roveda and Massimo Della Marta will be on display, along with the new ‘Wine frame’ collection project signed by artist Cristina Stifani c. For contemporary art, works by Brazilian artist Andrea de Carvalho, Brazilian photographer Monica Silva, Ukrainian photographer Anna Golubovskaja, artist Marilù S. Manzini, photographer Riccardo Aichner and Croatian-born artist Cristina Stifanic.
Brazilian art designer Alê Jordão presents his new sculptural chair ‘Cadeira Anjo’ (Angel Chair) Inspired by the angels and demons that permeate our lives, the chair is now proposed in a natural and ecological version using Ipê, one of Brazil’s most precious woods. Carved from a single piece of wood with a comfortable structure and ergonomics, the Anjo chair features its typical wing-shaped back and oxidised steel and carbon feet. The workmanship was carried out in the joinery of Zanini de Zanine, an internationally renowned designer known for his wood products. It will be a seated, unplanned journey of reflection, dreaming and wonder. Destiny will guide us wherever the wings of imagination take us,’ comments Alê Jordão.
For the first time in Milan, Brazilian art designer Marcelo Bilac presents the ‘Petro’ armchair, a beautiful one-off piece made of plywood, ebony veneer, flexible plywood and black paint with colourless varnish. Inspired by petroleum, a black liquid that has shaped the modern world, the Petro armchair invites us to reflect on the history, present and future of energy and the power of this material that has driven global progress. Like Petro, the armchair is an ode to duality. Its amorphous form, carved from laminated plywood, evokes the fluidity and raw power of the material that inspired it. The rough texture and imperfections of the ebonised varnish are reminiscent of the raw, untamed nature of oil.
Massimo Della Marta, designer and product engineer, creator of exclusive art design pieces, dedicates his latest Wine frame to Diabolik, one of the most renowned comics in history. Born from the collaboration with Galleria Paola Colombari, this is the second Wine frame dedicated to great characters, artists and well-known historical masters, such as the beautiful ‘Devalle Love’ in homage to the famous Turinese architect Carlo Mollino (1905-73).The work of the triptych “Colpo Eccezionale” in open set edition, is signed by the artist of Croatian origin Cristina Stifanic and includes in addition to the Wine frame “Diabolik”, two beautiful works of the artist “Colpo Eccezionale “and “Cheers”.
Pawel Grunert, a well-known Polish art designer, presents the sculpture seat “SIE 2”, a hay armchair inspired by the geometric framing of a grove of organic matter. “Symbolically, stealing a fragment of nature and transferring it into the home with the precision and imagination of a designer,” says the artist. Grunert uses natural materials such as branches, straw, earth, grass, hay, reeds and wood, but also bricks, textiles and metals for his works. He has designed and created around two hundred sculptures. “I dream of fields sown with chairs that grow like vines in France,” says the artist. “When designing, an artist always starts with the simplest form, an abstract form, and then gives free rein to his imagination. However, this approach does not make his furniture lose its functionality”.
Art designer Antonio Cagianelli presents a pair of glass vases from the “Street glass collection” executed by Chiara Ferraris Art & Glass Fusing. Through the large sculptural dimension of glass, Antonio Cagianelli stages his cry of rebellion against the politically correct society. “We are in front of a banlieue made of architecture in the process of destruction, of fragments of glass, of decadent structures” that the author lights up with his colourful graphics mixed with languages taken from rap, from the world of tattoos, from the border languages of the contemporary metropolis that have always been his signature.
Artist and art designer Alessandra Roveda presents the installation “Tea Time & Coffee Break”. Moments suspended in hectic lives. A colourful corner of the world for a moment of pause even for those who have no time. For Alessandra Roveda, crochet is craft, it is art, it is a language. The world around her is conceived as a large space to be covered and populated with magical creatures, recovering and reinterpreting forgotten objects. The artist defines herself as follows: “Thanks to knitting, I recreate my world, I express myself. I surround myself with objects and characters that did not exist before, making reality colourful and surreal”.
For the first time, comics as pop art becomes part of the exhibition on show at the Paola Colombari Gallery with artist Cristina Stifanic, an eclectic digital artist in constant search of images, whose genetic heritage she recombines, giving them a new life. She owns the rights to characters that populate Italian ‘Cult’ comics such as Diabolik and Eva Kant, Pantera Bionda and others. Cristina captures new aesthetics by creating a visual language that has the ability to inhabit universes as diverse as comics, NFT, generative artificial intelligence and augmented reality. The exhibition will feature a digital work printed on canvas on which she will perform pictorial interventions and apply augmented reality to narrate iconic design objects on the tables. The comic strip from which the work will be taken is “Diabolik investigates”, printed in 1975, of which the artist retains the original copy and the right to use the images. The exhibition also features a portrait of Eva Kant, enriched by the reality aum The suggestive expression of Lady Kant’s wink and the flight of Nobokov’s blue butterfly create an enchanted and oneiric.
The exhibition continues in the LANIERI space where artist Cristina Stifanic presents the works on canvas by Rudi and Silverio, which were first exhibited in 2011 at her solo exhibition “Diabolik Pop Ikon’”at the Museo del Fumetto e dell’Immagine Animata in Milan. Also on show is Cristina Stifanic’s beautiful work “Back to Paradise” with the image of master Enzo Facciolo, created with mixed media on canvas and augmented reality visible through the POETRONICAR app. The work was created with the permission of Diabolik’s publishing house Astorina. Diabolik and Eva Kant meet again, escaping from a parallel world that has seen them starring in countless adventures drawn on the pages of comic books. But now, guided by a mysterious destiny, they cross the threshold of a new enchanted universe, where climbing plants and lianas intertwine, revealing the intricate labyrinth of the artist’s creative mind from which new representations of reality are born. “Experimenting and inhabiting different universes are the most enjoyable part of my creative process. I chose to contaminate my art with comics because thanks to its essentiality it can be understood by anyone regardless of generations and cultures, comics speak to everyone. The rapidity of the stroke also makes this art more modern and universal than painting, for me the true heir of the visual arts”. Mario Gomboli, director of the well-known Diabolik publishing house Astorina comments “I must admit that Cristina Stifanic’s paintings have shown me an unexpected and unpredictable context, in which even secondary figures, real meteors that have passed through the Diabolik cosmos without leaving a trace, finally acquire their own autonomous dignity”.
Curated by Paola Colombari
