Arte Fiera Bologna : Booth A2

For its presentation at Arte Fiera Bologna 2024, Richard Saltoun Gallery showcases a selection of artists with a profound connection to Italy.

Carla ACCARDI (1924–2014) is considered a key member of the Italian avant-garde movement. In 1970, together with critic Carla Lonzi, she founded Rivolta Femminile, one of the first Italian feminist groups and publishing houses. In the first phase of her artistic career she painted in black and white, focusing on monochrome, colour and shapes. In the mid-1960s, she switched to intense and vibrant colours, making extensive use of a transparent plastic material called Sicofoil, which she describes as "a luminous medium for breaking down the totemic value of painting".

Sandro CHIA (1946–) is one of the leading exponents of the Transavanguardia movement. At the beginning of his career, he produced works characterised by a conceptual imprint; just later on he identified the pictorial process as the most suitable way to capture temporary feelings. His practice naturally evolved towards a free, unrestrained, intense and evocative painting, full of iconographic references from ancient and modern art. By embracing the enormous heritage of figurative painting, he introduced the use of colours and shapes, as well as the narration and enchantment of dreams into his artistic research.

Giulia NAPOLEONE (1936–), born in Pescara in 1936, is known for her abstract works on paper with various interventions in ink, watercolour or pencil that create unique inner landscapes, which she calls 'landscapes of dots'. In 2023, Richard Saltoun Gallery presented the solo exhibition Il Blu: Giulia Napoleone in its roman venue. It was the first exhibition in Rome dedicated to Giulia Napoleone after the retrospective Realtà in Equilibrio held at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome in 2018. Il Blu: Giulia Napoleone included works on paper and paintings created by the artist over a period of 60 years: from the early 1960s to the present and explored Napoleone's use of the colour blue. For the artist, this colour represents not only elements of nature such as the sea or the sky, but the "abstraction of multiple thoughts".

Gina PANE (1939–1990) was born in Biarritz (France) and spent most of her life working between Milan and Paris, where she died. At the beginning of the 1970s, Pane became a leading figure in the international Body Art movement with her 'actions' - a series of highly choreographed events in which the artist was subjected to intense physical and mental trials. In the 1980s, Pane stopped performing completely and began working in the fields of sculpture, installation and painting until her death.

The work of the Austrian artists Greta SCHÖDL (1929–) engages with the field of visual poetry and uses texts and domestic materials. Active since the 1960s, when the presence of female artists using text was a minority, Schödl has spent the last sixty years in Bologna refining a unique visual language through a series of mythical compositions.