Abramo Montini (Tepes)

Art of Freedom 2

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium and Jizaino present the second edition of “Art of Freedom”, a free theme group exhibition.



Differently from all our group shows, the exhibition cycle “Art of Freedom” does not have a main theme, so the artists have been chosen considering their personality and the contents. This did not exclude that the artworks on display were also inspired to freedom, which is a value constantly menaced and that needs continuous attentions.

Art of Freedom 2
18 March - 7 April 2024
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna, Italy

Opening hours: all days from 10 am to 6 pm booking on www.ctao.eu

Free entrance

The exhibition curated by Abramo Tepes Montini features paintings, graphics, photographs and videos by Aran, Lynn Bianchi, Guido Devadder, Masha Eretnova, Zizi Liu, Katarzyna Łukasiewicz, Marcantonio Lunardi, Tom Lundquist, Chris May, Laura Migliorino, Ruth Schmidt and Lex Turnbull.

This second edition of the Art of Freedom exhibition comes after more than two years. The first edition was held in a time of intense protests on a global level for the inhuman repression of individual freedom. Today, the scenario has changed, sadly with new and very serious events that still menace freedom: wars where thousands people are killed, millions are harassed or oppressed, while some unprecedented protests rise against the groups of power that impose merciless norms to governments asking more and more privations to the populace.

Today as always, freedom, whether spiritual or material, is a fundamental right that needs a big collective commitment to be preserved, defended from the reiterate menaces and attempts to oppress it.

http://ctao.eu/

TransHumance

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium and Jizaino present the group exhibition “TransHumance”.

Wearable high-tech, augmented reality, cybernetic prostheses, microchip implants, are the first steps of the transhumanism that herds human beings like cattle toward an alleged human-machine singularity. Does the human being desires to be free from the natural body’s caducity? What is the meaning of preserving the individual’s intellect in cyberspace? Which perspectives would immortality offer? Wouldn’t be more desirable to train our natural body and our innate potentialities relying on the resources and rebirth capability offered by nature?

TransHumance - Toward the precipitation of Self
19 June - 9 July 2023
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna, Italy

Opening hours: all days from 10.00 to 18.00 booking on www.ctao.eu

Free entrance

The group art exhibition curated by Abramo Tepes Montini features digital and traditional painting, photography, graphics and video artworks by Iryna Calinicenco, Bobby Kim Ling Chen, Andrew Cheung, Martin Del Carpio, Elina, Ian Haig, Magdalena Hejzlarová, Erika Kassnel-Henneberg, Lucien.Art, Jeremy Pellington, Nina Sumarac, Shaharee Vyaas and Andrzej Wojciechowski.

In the previous group exhibition, entitled Escapism, we addressed the issue about the always more penetrating and totalitarian oppression and control exerted on the individual by the political and governmental system, which implements the old method of “carrot and stick” to forcedly push the masses. If the “stick” is oppression, TransHumance wants to investigate one of the brand new “carrots” that today the system of power tries to feed to peoples: the trivial benefits of a transition toward the digitalisation and the artificial sophistication of the person, as a prodrome of transhumanism, leading to epochal anthropological implications and prime philosophic and ethical dilemmas.

The transhumanism would be an ideology that, starting from the union between man and the robotic and/or computer machine into the so-called “singularity”, would shift mankind toward another phase, a goal: the post-humanism, that is an era where the natural human being will be outdated, extinct, evolved into something that will not be human any more, since the prefix post- itself always specify the end of an era, in this case of the human being.

http://ctao.eu/

Escapism

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium and Jizaino present the group exhibition “Escapism”.

An exhibition relating to the reasons and to the psychic and emotional condition of the individual, who in good or bad, tries to escape a society that is bog-standard, oppressing, too complicated and demanding. Ambition, fantasy, dream, spirituality, faith and idealism counterposed to the burden of homogenisation, pragmatism and materialism.

Escapism - Art and intangible reality

24 April - 14 May 2023

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

Corso Buenos Aires 42 11

Lavagna, Italy

Opening hours: all days from 10.00 to 18.00 booking on www.ctao.eu

Free entrance

The exhibition curated by Abramo Tepes Montini features photography, painting, ceramic and video artworks by Pietro Angelini, Max Breakenridge, Shanna Fliegel, Lăcră Grozăvescu, Winnie KS Hui, Veronika Krämer, Ekaterina Kuzmina, Lucas Rebelo, Ruth & Alexander, Ian Kevin Scott, Leni Smoragdova and Tom Snelgrove.

After a time of intense social pressures and incredible global events, CTAO opens up 2023 with two essential and necessary exhibitions analysing our contemporaneity, where on one side we see the individual oppressed and controlled by a system that is always more penetrating and totalitarian, and on the other side we are urged toward horizons of an ideologic evolution of mankind, promoting an

improvement of the existence.

The first exhibition, Escapism, introduces the first pressing question of our epoch through the representation of the soul that reacts and tries to keep its human dimension, proposing a selection of artworks that are like breaches on the real truth, that is to say windows on the reality of existence, which is not tangible or evident, but outcome of an intimate contemplation of the apparent world, of a lucid interpretation of the sensorial illusion.

http://ctao.eu/

David Detrich - System of Simulacra

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium presents the first solo exhibition in Italy of David Detrich, American conceptual artist of great social relevance, who deals with the question of human society from an ethic and philosophic point of view. Detrich puts the beholder in front of the conflict between Being and Having, in the difficult coexistence of materialism and spirituality, creating artworks that make use of the expressive potentialities of new technologies and re-elaborate the mass collective imagery.

In his expressive discourse, Detrich stands as a critical interlocutor, with a subtle wit and a sensitivity that sometimes is expressed ironically with a veiled sarcasm otherwise in a more hieratic way, materialising the idea into artworks with a taste between totemic and parodistic.

David Detrich - System of Simulacra

25 May - 14 June 2022
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna, Italy

Open all days 10.00 - 18.00 booking on www.ctao.eu

Free entrance

http://ctao.eu/

We Are Joseph Beuys

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium and Jizaino present the group exhibition “We Are Joseph Beuys”.

A further exhibition to never quench but project indefinitely into the future the message of the shaman-artist who inspired many generations and promoted the environmentalist awareness in our society, in particular during his intense relation with the Italian cultural scene. This show wants to keep the debate running on the truest and deepest feeling of love for the nature that pushed him, through artworks by contemporary artists who confront with his way to express and make art, his activities, his personality or even his figure.

We Are Joseph Beuys
6 - 26 April 2022
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna, Italy

Opening hours: all days from 10.00 to 18.00 booking on www.ctao.eu

Free entrance

The exhibition curated by Abramo Tepes Montini features photography, performance, drawing, poetry and video artworks by Susana Barbara, blanche the vidiot, Benna Gaean Maris, Lamija Halilagic, Yana Kononova, Bill Psarras, Lucas Rebelo, Lexygius Sanchez Calip, José D. Trejo-Maya and Elena Waclawiczek, besides one multiple of the German master dating back to the Italian period of the 70s.

The safeguard of one's own natural habitat is tightly tied to the respect for the human being, thus it is a social and political attitude. And in this particular historical moment, witnessing the reignition of the conflict between superpowers, we have to stress that we are pacifists and we unite to the sorrow inflicted to people who wish to live in peace with the world and in their own habitat. For this sake we want to underline that some naturalist photographs by Ukrainian artist Yana Kononova will be exhibited, despite the objective difficulties of this moment.

http://ctao.eu/

Yana Kononova, Peat Ontologies

Art of Freedom

CON-TEMPORARY art observatorium

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium and Jizaino present the first edition of “Art of Freedom”, a free theme group exhibition.

Differently from all our group shows, the exhibition cycle “Art of Freedom” does not have a main theme, so the artists have been chosen considering their personality and the contents. This did not exclude that the artworks on display would even be inspired to freedom, which nowadays is a value that is menaced again and that needs new attentions.

Art of Freedom

29 October - 18 November 2021

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

Corso Buenos Aires 42 11

Lavagna, Italy

Opening hours: all days from 10.00 to 18.00 booking on www.ctao.eu

Free entrance

The exhibition curated by Abramo Tepes Montini features paintings, watercolours, graphics, photographs and videos by Mladen Bundalo, Vanessa Chyi, Adan De La Garza, DUNE, Paulo Fajardo, Yolanda García, Shouichi Iwamoto, Jennifer S. Lange, Antje Lindner, Manuela Mordhorst, Yu Chin Tseng and Claire Walka.

http://ctao.eu/

Zach Koch - Incognito Truth

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium is glad to announce the opening of the new exhibition season, presenting a motivated artistic programme for bringing art to the centre of attention again, as a result of the energies collected and themes developed in more than a year of forced meditation.

As a good start, we have the big pleasure to host Zach Koch, presenting him in Italy with a comprehensive solo exhibition, where his most recent digital production will be examined in the broadest context of his evolutionary path in the past years, starting from the oil painting.

A great poet of the digital generations’ imaginary, and expert as well in the classic techniques and the figurative renewal of the great masters, Koch incorporates in his artworks a “spirit of the age” balancing between romantic transiency and permanence of the absolute.

Zach Koch - Incognito Truth

24 July - 20 August 2021
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna, Italy

Open all days 10.00 - 18.00 booking on www.ctao.eu

Free entrance

Deus Ex Terra

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium and Jizaino present “Deus Ex Terra”, a new group exhibition dedicated to environmentalism aimed to the research of modus vivendi that are balanced with nature, beyond the simple denounce of its destruction, and in sync with the cosmos.

The human species successfully existed for millions years in harmony with nature, never destroying the environment as it is doing since just barely more than one century: ancient civilisations did understood the universe even not launching rockets to the Moon, breaking the atom, bending life or bleed dry the depths of the earth. The potentiality of imagination is sufficient to satisfy the urge to understand, because all that satiates the mind is already in ourselves and all that fulfils the body is already in the nature.

Deus Ex Terra
Visions beyond the deception of wealth
12 - 29 December 2019
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna (GE), Italy

Opening hours: from Thursday to Sunday 3 - 6 pm or by appointment

Free entrance

The show features paintings, photographs and installations by Carlos A. Bracho, Christine Chin, ebeck, Marcela Jardón, Michel Leclercq and Abramo ‘Tepes’ Montini, and videos by Ana Baer & Heike Salzer, Orsolya Bálint, Susana Barbará, Piers Broadfoot, Camille Crampsey, Mirjam Dahl Pedersen, Paulo Fajardo, Francisco García, Finn Harvor, Dee Hood, Simone Hooymans, Yuan Kong, Boris Marinin, Juliette McCawley, D.K. Odessa & Tara Mullins, Ruchita, José Paulo Santos, Terry Silvester, René Smaal, Igal Stulbach and Kat Vivaldi. Curated by Abramo Tepes Montini.

http://ctao.eu/

Egocracy

Con-Temporary Art Observatorium, Corso Buenos Aires, Lavagna, Metropolitan City of Genoa, Italy

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium presents “Egocracy”, a group exhibition curated by Abramo Tepes Montini that analyses with critic temper the meanderings of egocentricity, of self-referentialism and presentialism which permeate, rule and characterise the contemporary society of semblance. The argumentation reflected in the selected artworks touches on several points: from the elitist mind to the sense of possession, from pragmatism to mass control, from abuse to the redemption in virtuality.

Egocracy
The artistic sublimation of hegemonic Self
9 - 26 May 2019
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna (GE), Italy

Opening hours: from Thursday to Sunday 3 - 6 pm or by appointment

Free entrance

Exhibiting artists: David Detrich, Ines Maria Krämer, W.K.Lyhne, Laura Migliorino, Amie Neri, Alexandra Tudosia, Hanwen Zhang.

The show features large and medium size paintings, oil, acrylic, mixed technique and neon, photographic prints and CGI.

“We often talk about power as if it was something abstract, something that develops for elective affinities or for other unavoidable and undetermined reasons. But still power is something wanted and pursued by persons, by individuals, it is the expression of their hunger for privileges.”

http://ctao.eu/

Pop Surrealism

Corso Buenos Aires 42 11 - Lavagna, Italy

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium presents “Pop Surrealism”, a collective exhibition dedicated to the style or mannerism that in the fragmented contemporary art context has become a widely recognised movement, joining always more artists, lovers and collectors of every social class and by now at a trans-generational level. The exhibition of a concise and variegated selection of international protagonists offers even innovative perspectives on this genre that represents the most actual evolution of Lowbrow.

Pop Surrealism
Lowbrow Art: From Mass Culture to Massive Culture
20 December 2018 - 6 January 2019
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna (GE), Italy

Opening hours: from Thursday to Sunday 3 - 6 pm or by appointment

Free entrance

The exhibition features artworks of drawing, painting and collage, both traditional and digital, by the artists: Dead Dolls House, Craig Hill, Mary M., Michael Vincent Manalo, Abramo ‘Tepes’ Montini, Carolina Pulido, The Cici Artist and Catrin Welz-Stein.

Like if it was a neo-mannerism, Pop Surrealism is apparently characterised by the mere technical practice in creating an aesthetically pleasing style, but its real objective is actually the elevation of the critical spirit and of the being as a protagonist.
The stylemarks have obviously changed and have been updated to actual trends, among which the collective imagination of surrealism that is now part of mass culture, but that in comparison are more real inasmuch popularly recognisable today, providing us a mirror where to look ourself in the social context, understand how and where we live.
The figure, character, individual or person is often fulcrum of every pop surrealist work, it is Alpha and Omega, origin and purpose of everything is surrounding it, and of what it surrounds itself with, the Zeitgeist of this epoch.

http://ctao.eu/

EGOSOPHY

Corso Buenos Aires 42 11 - Lavagna (GE), Italy

CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium presents EGOSOPHY, a collective exhibition curated by Abramo ‘Tepes’ Montini about art and existential philosophy.

EGOSOPHY
Ego Ergo Cogito
4 - 21 October 2018
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11
Lavagna (GE), Italy

Opening hours: from Thursday to Sunday 3 - 6 pm or by appointment

Free entrance

The exhibition will feature artworks of painting, graphics, photography and installation by the artists: Parul Bouvart, Cyborg Art Collective, Gabriel Embeha, Valentina Lari, Nikolaos Mantziaris, Tim Rudolph, Stefano Sansoni (Orma), Andrew Shaw.

Ego ergo cogito: I do exist, thus I think. The artists through their artworks speak about their own lifestyle, about their own behaviour and philosophy. Here, ego is not meant as egotism or self-referentialism, but as the acceptation of the Latin word for “I exist”, thus existence as expression of self, in the sharing of one’s own experience with others.

http://ctao.eu/