Who is the Italian visual artist Nicola Samorì?

Who is Nicolas Samori?

Nicola Samori is an Italian visual artist known for his paintings and drawings. He has been working with a wide variety of techniques and themes, but is especially known for his representations of portraits and human figures. Samori is known for his ability to create intense and emotional images that explore questions of identity, individuality and belonging. His work has been widely praised for its ability to balance traditional painting technique with a contemporary and subjective approach. Nicola Samori's dark, baroque-inspired oil paintings are skillful reproductions of classic portraits and still lifes on canvas, wood or copper, purposefully destroyed to deny classical representation and call into question the painting itself. His process involves “skinning” his painted figures with a spatula or paint thinner, placing another image on top and repeating the process until the images merge and signs of erasure and scratches dominate the reworked surface. Samori explains that exposing the interior of the paint by removing layers of “skin” with a scalpel reveals “a freshness and intensity unknown in the outer tones”.

Nicole Samori's Artistic Career

Nicola Samorì was born in 1977 in Forlì and graduated in 2004 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. A painter and sculptor, his career stands out for his attempt to endanger forms derived from the history of Western culture: in them, the represented body and the pictorial surface are revealed without a break in continuity, and one has the impression that the birth of a new work always involves the sacrifice of an old one.
From 2010, the first skinning of the pigment appears in his works, a process evidenced in three exhibitions in 2011: Baroque, LARMgalleri, Copenhagen; Scoriada, Studio Raffaelli, Trento; Imaginifragus, Christian Ehrentraut Gallery, Berlin. The following year, his first solo exhibition was held in a museum: Fegefeuer, Kunsthalle, Tübingen. With the exhibition Die Verwindung, mounted at the Emilio Mazzoli Gallery in Modena in January 2013, “the artist ended up punishing what he had composed, thus leading to the inevitable and indispensable murder of painting” (Alberto Zanchetta). In 2014 solo and group exhibitions took place at the Schauwerk in Sindelfingen, at the MAC in Lissone, at the Kunsthalle in Kiel and in the Palladian cellars of Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza. The following year, he was selected to participate in the 56th Venice Biennale, and included in the exhibition project Codice Italia, curated by Vincenzo Trione.
Also in 2015, the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Stettin dedicated a vast monograph entitled Religo to him. Personal projects at the Monitor Gallery in Rome and the first solo exhibition at the Leipzig headquarters of the EIGEN + ART Gallery are from 2016, followed by participation in the 16th National Quadrennial of Art in Rome and at Gare de l'Est, Teatro Anatomical in Padua. In 2017 he participated in the Art in Art collective at MOCAK in Kraków and two monographs took place at the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro and at the Neue Galerie in Gladbeck. Between 2017 and 2018, he participated in the exhibition The New Frontiers of Painting at the Fondazione Stelline in Milan, where he returned in spring 2019 on the occasion of the exhibition The Last Supper after Leonardo. In 2018, the experiments with the fresco technique carried out in the previous two years converge in the exhibition Malafonte at Galerie EIGEN + ART in Berlin.
At the end of 2019, he held the individual Cannibal Trail, at the Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Caotun (Nantou, Taiwan), his first in Asia; at the beginning of 2020 he set up the Black Square project in Naples, at the Made in Claustro Foundation and at the Archaeological Museum and in September with the solo exhibition In abysso he returned to the headquarters of Galerie EIGEN + ART in Berlin. In November, he opens an individual exhibition at the Mart Museum in Rovereto dedicated to the figure of Saint Lucia, one of the guiding images of the last years of his work.

Characteristics of the works of Nicola Samori

Nicola Samori is known for his various approaches to creating his theatrical and disturbing two- or three-dimensional images, as can be seen in the works Kazimir (2010) and Destino dell' Occhio (2011). He specialized in an aggressive baroque art form, exemplified by the old masters of the 17th century in Holland and Bologna. Samori ridicules these painted civilized images, transforming them into objects of pity or disgust, as evidenced by Seer (2011), Agnese (2009), June 27 (crowned) (2014) and Ciclope (2020). It is an emotional and physical assault on the cumulative weight of art history pressing down on contemporary European artists, believing in the power of 'irresponsibility' and 'wounding' to fight back – a retaliation in search of freedom.
The wound in his paintings is aided by his admiration for modernist artists such as Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, known for eliminating the basic support materials of painting, and also by his interest in “moulage”. These works can be seen as an attack on a specific period of art, or they can be interpreted more broadly as a fierce rejection of all types of art, sweeping the whole concept of artistic practice aside.

Sfregi at Palazzo Fava in Bologna

Sfregi is the first Italian anthological exhibition of Samorì, presented in the halls of Palazzo Fava in Bologna and curated by Alberto Zanchetta and Chiara Stefani. The exhibition narrates the twenty years of his career through 80 works in an exhibition script conceived and created by the artist himself exclusively for the rooms of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni di Genus Bononiae. Museums of the city of Bologna.
The exhibition is an opportunity for Samorì to come face to face with the entire history of art, and in particular with the Baroque era, articulating a course of suggestions and analogies and triggering a close and intense relationship with the precious frieze paintings that decorate the walls. of the Piano Nobile and with some works identified in the Art and History collections of the Carisbo Foundation, such as the evocative portraits of blind women by Annibale Carracci, establishing an "elective affinity", as well as with the spaces, with the same heritage as the Museum. Thus, the Salone Nobile with The Myth of Jason and Medea hosts a series of works that go back to the last decade of activities that seem to react to the frieze of the three Carracci; Ludovico's frescoed room brings together works focused on burning copper and the body without flesh, while Albani's becomes Samorì's wunderkammer, in which still lifes created in stone find space. The Sala delle Grottesche receives Malafonte, an outstanding monumental fresco that fits perfectly into the space, exactly 380 centimeters wide, like the work, a coincidence that the artist wanted to interpret as a "welcome" from Palazzo Fava.
In the rooms on the second floor, more intimate works are on display, in small and medium formats that investigate unique themes or bet on the different techniques used - from the use of onyx and stone to the blurring of the image - which allow the visitor to embrace the vastness of the production of Samorì and test his obsessive and obsessive research that qualifies him as one of the most interesting artists on the international contemporary scene.