From 30/09/2021 To 04/01/2022
Fondazione Coppola – Corso Andrea Palladio, 1, 36100 Vicenza (Italy)
Enrance ticket 5 €
Green Pass required
Curated by: Fondazione Coppola
Recommended to: Contemporary art lovers; Emerging and innovative artists enthusiasts; Art lovers in general.
January 4, 2022
The exhibition, inaugurated on September 30, 2021, hosted on the 6th floor of Porta Castello’s Torrione (High Tower) in Vicenza, has been open to the public till January 4, 2022. Fondazione Coppola presented its new exhibition under the patronage of Vicenza’s municipality.
Fondazione Coppola was founded in 2018 at the initiative of entrepreneur, collector and patron Antonio Coppola. This aims to promote contemporary art’s expressions investing in already acclaimed figures and, above all, in emerging ones. This space wants to host artists who are questioning themselves and want to trace a path on their way of being an artist, using their unique vision to accompany the visitor. The possibility that opens up is that of helping the person who comes into contact with the works of art to understand their new points of reference; in other words, it aims to make the viewers understand which work or artists moved them more deeply and profoundly.
The Foundation aims to involve the younger generations in this space dedicated to the contemporary and, at the same time, capture experts and enthusiasts.
The ancient medieval fortification of Torrione of Porta Castello (Porta Castello’s High Tower), acquired, restored and transformed into the headquarters of the Fondazione Coppola, is a Berico monument symbol. The tower, built in the 12th century, was demolished after the death of the tyrant Ezzelino da Romano. In the mid-fourteenth century, during the Scaligeri occupation, it was rebuilt and integrated into a castle. Under the Visconti family, the crenellation and upper lantern were added, giving it its present appearance. Between the 17th and 18th centuries, the Serenissima Republic of Venice sold the castle to the Valmarana family, who dismantled it to create their palace, leaving the Torrione intact. In the 20th century, the entrance arch was enlarged for traffic reasons, and two walkways were opened on either side.
Despite being portrayed by Bellini in the “Pietà Martinengo”, the tower was inaccessible to citizens for centuries. The Fondazione purchased the tower and sold it to the municipality of Vicenza in exchange for a thirty-year concession to make it a contemporary art space. They then undertook its new exhibition route’s restoration and preparation works.
The Torrione (High Tower) reaches a height of 41.60 metres on eight levels and offers a breathtaking all-around view of Vicenza’s historic centre.
Nana Wolke. Some Girls Wonder By Mistake is a solo exhibition by the twenty-seven-year-old Slovenian artist Nana Wolke. Born in 1994 in Ljubljana, she currently lives and works in London, where she graduated from Goldsmiths College. She graduated with honours from the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana and completed her final year of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana through the study exchange programme Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Nana Wolke‘s works have been exhibited in major galleries, and she has been nominated for several internationally important awards.
The exhibition is located on the sixth floor of Vicenza’s Torrione and aims to make the viewer reflect on themes of distance, sex, friendship, and illegibility. This reflection starts with the photographic staging of scenes centered on lighting and point of view and revolves around the fragmentary nature of the views themselves. The various fragments cannot be traced back to an unambiguous and specific experience but are lost in an interweaving of references between personal and communal, intimate and social, memory and dream, movement and stillness, emptiness and fullness. These works’ desire is to indulge in an extension of a moment divided between desire and shame.
[…] Summers competed with geological eras in which landscapes shift and warp, rippling our skin, making our voices hoarser from cigarettes and bourbon. We sank into the olive green couch, the yellow light showing the dust kicking up around us as we flipped through a stack of soft porn books, amused and aroused by cheap incomplete words from some guys engaging in the same thing in front of us… […]
Nana Wolke
On the sixth floor of the tower, Nana Wolke‘s paintings in oil on linen are displayed alongside the walls in special spaces created in the process of the tower transformation. The distance between the works and the appropriate lighting makes them legible and enjoyable for all visitors.
The derivation of her artistic research from Polaroids is recognizable in the fragmentary nature of the representations, but it is interpreted from an everyday and intimate perspective. The detail stolen in rapidity is revisited through the usage of warm brushstrokes with a prevalence of red and pink tones. The moments impressed on the canvas sink into the private dimension of the individual and return as a sequence of frames of bodies undressing, backs, mouths smiling, female hands, and depictions that border on the abstract. The atmosphere is charged with a delicate eroticism, already set up by the graphics of the poster, which recall those of old soft porn books.
The fragmentary nature of Wolke’s work is further underlined by the space in which it is housed. Indeed, the paintings alternate between the solid, closed spaces of the tower’s medieval walls and the airy spaces of the windows, which as you move through the exhibition, offer you different views of the city and even provide the viewer unexpected reflections. The details depicted by Nana Wolke make the viewer want to go beyond the image and question the meaning of the individual moment portrayed, placing themselves at stake.
Tip: The moment you start to move, you interact with the exhibition.
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