Portraits

PORTRAITS

Federica Bruni - Claudia Sinigaglia

13.11.2021 – 28.11.2021

The exhibition project aims to transform the space at Wellgate Shopping Centre (a former clothing shop) by triggering a dialogue between works that investigate the theme of portrait and its multiple facets.

Next Door, by Federica Bruni includes 11 large format portraits obtained by expanding the pictures of a selection of most wanted foreign spies taken from the FBI website. These individuals that are coming from a diverse range of countries such as China, Ukraine, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are represented here as a metaphor of the concept of invisibility. Through time, informers develop the peculiar ability to disguise and to become unnoticed in their everyday. They are masters of illusionism. They serve as the counter-parts of the need of standing out dominating our social media contemporary society. Furthermore, by enlarging low-resolution pictures the portraits are transformed into something new, abstract, and ephemeral like the concept they symbolize.

Untitled (Portraits) by Claudia Sinigaglia, consists of a series of small portraits painted on cropped photos taken from magazines. This work has been developed during a year in which, due to numerous restrictions, our face-to-face interactions were limited and we were seeing most of our contacts only through profile pictures. This work aims to reflect on identity’s creation within contemporary communication.

The two series, although very different in formal nature, deal with the same theme. This characteristic creates a dichotomy that is mirrored in the exhibition space thanks to a variety of visual formats combined with the transition from full to empty, and from excess to absence.