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3/5/2006

Federico Solmi/Wolf Hamm

Galeria ADN, Barcelona

Sala 1
Federico Solmi
King Kong and the End of the World

King Kong and the End of the World (2005) is a four-minute video animation of about 1.100 mix-media drawings on paper. It is the result of collaboration between this self-taught artist and the 3D artist Russell LOWE, conceived as the remake of the original movie dating from 1933. The piece combines the original plot with anachronisms that spark our imagination. The characters are the stereotypical disoriented anti-heroes, in search for identity and forced to live in a hostile, ruthless, and frenzy society. Solmi represents the ruin of present urban life to emphasize our neurotic way of living, hectic and pregnant with dichotomies and contradictions.
The animation was shown for the first time in December 2005 at Pulse Fair, Miami. It was also screened at the Guggenheim of New York during a conference regarding emergent artists, and will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art of St. Etienne, France, in October 2006.

Artist’s Statement

As an untiring observer of the alienated scenery of the metropolitan reality, I am focusing, in my installations and videos, to analyse the paradoxical situation that modifies our approach and our attitude toward everyday life. The neurotic urban landscape, the frenetic life in the big city and the colossal contradiction of contemporary society, are the key themes on which my artistic search has been based.
The universe that I like to represent is the exaltation of a present that is crumbling. It is also a criticism of a system that approves and trusts without questioning the fragile foundation on which our culture and post-modernist society is based. To be completely honest, I am not interested to transfer to canvas the most important facts that are sculpting our age. I absolutely not consider myself a chronicler of the current days. On the contrary, I am simply using the contemporary events to confuse and to “disinform" the viewers.

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Sala 2
Wolf Hamm
A vida o muerto

Wolf Hamm's new work vaguely refers to the old engravings and xylographs of Durero, Schongauer o Baldung Grien, yet it also offers a whole range of aesthetic solutions; in the artist's words: “we always build upon what it is already there". Wolf Hamm utilizes drawings as the departing point to clarify something, to convey an idea, “the first step is to introduce ideas that later will be elaborated. Their strength resides in their initial vagueness," as he affirms. His black lines and dots are restless and the final composition seems to be imprisoned by an invisible hand. As a result, the stories fight to spring from abstracted passages, although the final outcome is always under control.

Wolf Hamm seems to dig from religious themes: the original sin, resurrection, salvation, the hope for everlasting life; he mingles them with everyday observations documented in his notebooks. His subject matters come, as he says, from the streets, the subway, bars, “indeed from every place where people gather and hold casual meetings."

After completing his fine-art studies, he has extensively travelled thanks to several scholarships and artist residences in German and Spanish institutions. In Spain he has mainly shown in the Basque Country thanks to his collaboration with Bilbao Arte

Opening 4th may 7.30pm

Galleria ADN
Enric Granados, 49 08008 Barcelona

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