Oscar Giaconia – Fondazione Coppola

The Kitbasher, Oscar Giaconia's solo exhibition at Fondazione Coppola, is configured as a protean collection of pictorial works produced over time. The exhibition will be on display between 29 October 2023 and 21 January 2024.

Making use of the shape of the medieval Tower that develops on eight levels, interpreted by the artist as a fortified pit, The Kitbasher stages a different situation on each floor, in an objective correlation between the architectural morphology and the stratified nature of Giaconia's work. Through the viewing of the 26 works installed, the user is thus granted a broad overview of the artist's production of the last 15 years. Ranging from the diptych Ginnungagap, 2010 up to Colon (Exterminator), 2023 created on the occasion of the exhibition. Overall, The Kitbasher appears like a bubble wrap of the creator's visual thought. Each level of the Tower corresponds to a sampling of the imagination.

During the opening weekend, on Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 October, The Kitbasher will be accompanied by the sound installation SEYRAZEN, composed ad hoc by Steve Piccolo, an artist with whom Giaconia has also collaborated previously on several occasions. The piece consists of a serenade of sirens, understood in the dual meaning of bewitching song and alarm. The maximum concentration of sound occurs in the space at the top of the Tower, SEYRAZEN therefore becomes a premonition, full of sound plot holes, that accompanies the visitor through the exhibition, intensifying as he procedes to go up.

All the paintings from the series The Kitbasher have been palced on the top floor: figures that emerged after the prosthetic make-up sessions that the artist assisted to in 2016 and 2018, respectively in conjunction with the exhibition GREEN ROOM (Baco) and HOYSTERIA (GAMeC – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bergamo).

The Kitbasher presents itself as a: non-taxonomizable figures (sorcerers? shamans? mystics? stylites? hunters? homo selvaticus?) and practice derived from modeling aimed at the reassembly of loose pieces. Kitbashing, a playful exercise about recomposing objects to scale, here takes on the paroxysmal value of a destruction manual: the creator is the conjunction of making and tearing oneself to pieces, but also, in the meaning of the Russian anthropologist Sergei Shirokogoroff, a sort of cap or safety valve between separate dimensions.

Oscar Giaconia (Milan, 1978)

Making use mainly of painting, understood practice to digest other languages, Oscar Giaconia's work satellites around multiple areas of research, the concepts of monster, stand-in, autopsy and parasite are just some of the key words, (reversible to the transformative qualities of pictorial media), which have always accompanied the artist's stratified research, also characterized by the use of inorganic and synthetic devices such as silicone, vulcanite, nylon, para rubber and neoprene cases. Selected solo exhibitions: 2023 Parasite Soufflé, Monitor Rome; 2021 CRYPTOZOOGODEMICHET, Monitor Lisbon; 2020 BHULK, Monitor Rome; 2019 Hoysteria, curated by Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni, GAMeC Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bergamo; 2017 WUNDERKAMMER N.1 | OVERMAN, Thomas Brambilla Gallery, Bergamo; 2016 GREEN ROOM, curated by Stefano Raimondi and Mauro Zanchi, BACO Contemporary Art, Palazzo della Misericordia, Bergamo; 2013 AYE-AYE, National Museum of Natural History, Mdina - Malta; 2012 ALEA, curated by Stefano Raimondi, Thomas Brambilla Gallery, Bergamo.

Steve Piccolo (New Hampshire, 1954)

Present on the international scene since the mid-1970s, throughout his career Steve Piccolo has worked in music (he is the co-founder of the Lounge Lizards), theatre, performance, sound installation, film and fiction soundtrack. He has exhibited works and created performances in many museums, galleries and international artistic events, including Frieze London, MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Palazzo Reale in Milan, Venice Biennale. Numerous collaborations with other artists include works with Adrian Paci, Luca Pancrazzi (with whom he forms the DE-ABC group with Gak Sato), Gabriele Di Matteo (with whom he creates the artist magazine E IL TOPO, winner of the 2023 edition of the Italian Council), A Constructed World with Nathalie Du Pasquier, and many others. He currently collaborates with the Zurich-based project agency Art Apart, producing apps and artist books (including BLKNSM during the 55th Venice Biennale and BLKNSM and in St. Petersburg as a side event of Manifesta 10).