BO130: Subterranean Modern – from Punk to Urban Art

“At this very moment of our history I don’t think there is actually nobody able to claim with certainty what art is or what it could be, and yet which direction is taking. The only thing we know for sure is that in this new millennium, art is assuming any kind of shape but from now on it will never be an exclusive privilege of few elite people.”

Giacomo Spazio.

Subterranean Modern – from Punk to Urban Art - is the first attempt to show a cultural and aesthetic path of the Italian art through a thirty year lapse of time.

The protagonists of this multicoloured world have steadily and strongly claimed their peculiar artistic vision which is light years far from the stylistic canons taught at the academies of our peninsula and commonly accepted among the official Italian art circuits. A type of art that very often has found little room even in galleries and despite this, has succeeded to survive, get developed and get evolved.

Subterranean Modern includes fifty Italian artists among painters, sculptors, photographers and illustrators, each of them diverse for style, media used and sign, but connected to each other by a mutual expressive orientation and in some cases, an independent flippant concept of art. The artists called for the show, are strongly related to pop culture, and, at the same time, they got a lively interest in both national and international subcultures, a flamboyant D.I.Y. approach (Do It Yourself), and a stylistic genius, sometimes classic, sometimes deviant or provocative. Many of them have done, do and will keep on doing some illegal acts, gestures of endless beauty.

Despite the academic background for the most, their work is clearly influenced by comics, spray paint, science fiction, architecture, anime art, cartoons and of course by music, could it be punk, reggae, new wave, jazz or hip-hop…

These cool guys share the rejection for any kind of compromise or shortcut in the name of success. All of them have developed their own independent ideas apart from fashion trends and marketing rules so causing a gap with the officially recognized art circuit which too many times does not even consider their potential as artists ignoring the fact that they attract more and more people between admirers and collectors to the exhibitions.

“Subterranean Modern” proposes to cast a glance, free from prejudice, at the national artistic panorama, putting in evidence both the work of every single artist and the connection to each others’ work through the cultural context in which they have been moving along the years, always being aware that it is impossible to put them all together under a single name or a unique artistic stream.

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Subterranean Modern – from Punk to Urban Art – a not exhaustive path inside the meanders of the Italian contemporary art through the work of fifty artists, an idea by Giacomo Spazio, where music, pop culture and an aesthetic diffused illegality of the “do it yourself” offer the vision of a unique but multi stratified reality.

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