Descripción de la Exposición
Monitor is thrilled to announce the opening of Flores by Nicola Samorì (1977, Forlì). After his debut presentation in Portugal during Drawing Room Lisbon in 2023, we are excited to finally showcase his first solo exhibition in the country.
In Flores, Nicola Samorì will unveil a new collection of oil paintings created on various surfaces, including wood, copper, Trani stone, and pink Portuguese marble. The exhibition will feature a critical text written by Óscar Faria.
Nicola Samorì was born in 1977 in Forlì and graduated in 2004 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He lives and works in Bagnacavallo (Ravenna). As a painter and sculptor, his work highlights the attempt to challenge forms derived from the history of Western culture. In his pieces, the opening of the depicted body and the painted surface appear seamless, giving the impression that the creation of a new work always involves the sacrifice of an old one.
Starting in 2010, the first abrasions of the painted surface began to appear in Nicola Samorì's works: the disruption of forms emerges in all its freshness and brutality, as if the painting surface was a skin to be torn away. This process became evident in three exhibitions in 2011: Baroque at LARM galleri, Copenhagen; Scoriada at Studio Raffaelli, Trento; and Imagini fragus at Christian Ehrentraut Gallery, Berlin.
The two-year period from 2010 to 2012 was documented in his first solo exhibition in a museum setting: Fegefeuer at Kunsthalle, Tübingen, from September to December 2012. With the exhibition Die Verwinding, held at Galleria Emilio Mazzoli in Modena in January 2013, a metaphorical assassination of painting was staged. In November of the same year, he held his second solo show at Christian Ehrentraut Gallery, titled Guarigione dell’Ossesso ("Healing of the Obsessed"), a selection of works that revealed the artist's disillusionment (defined as the "Obsessed") and the attainment of a new awareness, leading him to move away from a blind faith in the power of painting that had driven his actions until then.
In 2014, he participated in several solo and group exhibitions at Schauwerk in Sindelfingen, the MAC in Lissone, the Kunsthalle in Kiel, and in the Palladian cellars of Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza (La pittura è cosa mortale - "Painting is a Mortal Thing"). The following year, he was selected to participate in the 56th Venice Biennale, as part of the Codice Italia project. Also in 2015, he took part in Gare du Nord at the Anatomical Theater in Amsterdam, Gare du Sud at the Anatomical Theater of the Archiginnasio in Bologna, and the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin dedicated a large solo exhibition to him titled Religo.
In 2016, he held solo exhibitions at Galleria Monitor in Rome and his first solo show at the Leipzig branch of Galerie EIGEN+ART (Double Page - of Frogs and Flowers), followed by participation in the 16th National Art Quadriennale in Rome and Gare de l'Est at the Anatomical Theater in Padua. In 2017, he took part in the group exhibition Art in Art at MOCAK in Krakow, and held two solo shows at the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro and the Neue Galerie in Gladbeck.
Between 2017 and 2018, Nicola Samorì participated in The New Frontiers of Painting exhibition at the Stelline Foundation in Milan, where he returned in the spring of 2019 for the exhibition The Last Supper after Leonardo. In this show, he presented a monumental copper piece painted with sulfur, in which the "dazzling stain" of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper undergoes further degeneration, leaving only impressions, like negatives, of twelve bodies oriented toward a radiant center.
In 2018, his experiments with fresco techniques, conducted over the previous two years, culminated in the exhibition Malafonte at Galerie EIGEN+ART in Berlin. The back wall of the exhibition space was entirely covered with a large torn fresco. In the same show, his first painted stones were exhibited—onyx slabs with natural cavities, used as supports that interacted with compositions drawn from the vast iconography of miracles in ancient painting.
At the end of 2019, he held the solo exhibition Cannibal Trail at the Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art in Cantou (Nantou, Taiwan), his first show in Asia. In early 2020, he presented the Black Square project in Naples at the Fondazione Made in Cloister and the Archaeological Museum, and in September, he returned to the Berlin branch of Galerie EIGEN+ART with the solo show In abisso ("Into the Abyss"). In November, he opened a solo exhibition at the Mart Museum in Rovereto, dedicated to the figure of Saint Lucy, one of the guiding images in his recent work.
In 2021, a retrospective titled Sfregi ("Scars"), covering seventeen years of work with over eighty pieces, was presented at Palazzo Fava in Bologna. In his solo show Le ossa della madre ("The Mother’s Bones") at Villa d’Este (Tivoli), he showcased his largest collection of stone works, arranged like pebbles on a series of tables that occupied the noble rooms of the villa. Meanwhile, in the Luce e sangue ("Light and Blood") project at the San Gennaro Treasure Museum, copper took center stage—Naples Baroque's metal of choice—shining in the skin of the two hermits created for the Sacristy of Luca Giordano.
In 2024, he began a collaboration with Nicodim Gallery (New York, Los Angeles, Bucharest), which, with the solo show Blend the Blind at its New York location, provided an opportunity to explore the incursion of artificial intelligence into Samorì's work. This series of works processed countless sources from the past, creating a gallery of new apparitions—similar to the ancient, but untraceable in history. From 2021 to 2024, he also participated in two editions of PANORAMA Italics and exhibited at several museums, including DOX in Prague, the Triennale di Milano, MART in Rovereto, KINDL (Centre for Contemporary Art) in Berlin, and, most recently, The 4th China Xinjiang International Art Biennial in Xinjiang, China.
Exposición. 15 oct de 2024 - 16 feb de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. El 25 oct de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
