Stefano Arienti
As the master for the springtime workshop 2006 the Foundation has selected Stefano Arienti.
Born in Asola (Mantova) in 1961. Lives and works in Milan.
Stefano Arienti tackles many themes connected with the complex world of “ways of seeing” in his work in the conviction that creating art can contribute to reawakening perceptive feelers numbed by the overexposure to stimuli that we are currently subjected to. In this way he addresses the spectator by steering her/him towards independent, critical and conscious mental processes. Arienti manipulates and experiments with the properties of everyday materials, conceiving ever-newer techniques and working methods. By folding, drilling or burning paper; removing texts and images, tracing textiles and photographs the artist entices the public into his world, dominated by apparently repetitive acts, simplicity and playful gestures borrowed from children.
His artistic experimentation also affects the materials and techniques that are used to build and present the image: a book can find itself transformed into a plastic volume, a comic becomes a cylinder, a drawing can take on the three-dimensional form of that which it represented as a flat drawing.
Arienti is one of the most influential artists of his generation, and has taken part in many group and one-man shows. These include his retrospective, MAXXI, in Rome in 2004 and at the Fondazione Re Sandretto Rebaudengo in 2005; his participation in the Anteprima Bovisa, Milano Europa 2000 at the Milan Triennial in 2001, the Venice Biennial in 1993 and in the section Aperto at the 3rd International Biennial in Istanbul in 1992.