Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, and Adelita Husni-Bey to Represent Italy at 2017 Venice Biennale
Cecilia Alemani, curator of the Italian pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, has selected Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, and Adelita Husni-Bey to represent Italy at the fifty-seventh edition of the Biennale. Alemani is also director of High Line Art and the curator of Frieze Projects at Frieze, both in New York.
“The works of Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, and Adelita Husni-Bey stand out as complementary yet different in their approach to making art in Italy today,” said Alemani. “These three artists were born in Italy between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, and came onto the domestic and international scene at the brink of the new century, each at their own level of fame: from Husni-Bey’s promising young talent, to Cuoghi’s more mature oeuvre. While their art and their languages are global, their work is still closely tied to Italian culture . . . My project is not meant to provide a full overview of Italian art: Instead, it will provide an in-depth look at the work of three unique voices that have come to the fore in recent years, giving them the space, time, and resources to develop an ambitious large-scale project that will mark a milestone in their careers.”
Cuoghi is well known for his projects that melt fiction into reality, such as the artist’s early performance of physically transforming himself into his father for a period of seven years, which Alison M. Gingeras wrote about in the Summer 2005 issue of Artforum. Giorgio Andreotta Calò, who was in the 2015 Triennale di Milano, the 2015 Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, and the Institut Culturel Italien de Paris in 2014, among other exhibitions, is an artist whose delicately wrought sculptures explore nature, architecture, and violence. Adelita Husni-Bey, via radio broadcasts, publications, archives, and more, examines “in detail both the ways in which societies produce and distribute knowledge, and the conditions required for an alternative social imagination to prosper,” wrote Paola Nicolin in a review of the artist’s exhibition for the Laveronica Arte Contemporanea in the April 2015 issue of Artforum.