Matteo Gironi

Artist biography

Matteo Gironi is is an established, mid-career contemporary artist, who originates from Italy, like other well-known artists such as Giuliano Ghelli, Thomas Raimondi, Saggion- Paganello, Roberto Parzani, and Tiziana La Melia. Matteo Gironi was born in 1973.

About Matteo Gironi's works

Matteo Gironi plays a pivotal role in the fields of Design, Conceptual and Abstraction. What separates art from design has been a longstanding debate, the lines are blurred. The classical notion of design used to be anchored in the Decorative Arts, but later on divided itself into a variety of areas such as graphic design, fashion design, or industrial design. The Arts and Crafts Movement and The Bauhaus were extremely influential movements that pursued for a unification of true artistic creativity with the manufacturing of objects.

Emerging as an art movement in the 1960s, Conceptualism has sparked a significant amount of controversy and debate, usually provoking strong reactions in its viewership. Conceptual art by essence implies that the idea behind the actual artwork is more important than the finished product itself. The research and strategies conducted by the artist represent the most significant part of the work, conceptual art thus aims to be an art of the mind, instead of appealing to the senses. Although it refers to art from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, the origins of Conceptualism can be traced back to 1917, with Marcel Duchamp and his controversial artwork Fontaine, which tried to erase the boundaries between art and reality. Conceptual art is not as straightforward as other movements, as it uses an interdisciplinary approach, and the artworks can take the form of anything - from everyday objects to performances requiring audience participation.

Abstract art does not try to represent a faithful depiction of a visual reality, or of nature itself, but instead, with the use of colours, gestural elements and shapes tries to achieve its effect. The term can be applied to art that is primarily based on an object, or figure, where the main features have been simplified. Abstraction has been highly significant in modern art since the 1900s, with its origins grounded in Impressionism. One of the first, most influential movements related to abstraction is Cubism, with artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who through their work laid the foundations for an important number of branches of abstract art.

Galleries and Exhibitions

Matteo Gironi is represented by E3 arte contemporanea located in Brescia, Italy. Matteo Gironi's work has most recently been exhibited at E3 arte contemporanea in Brescia (02 March 2019 until 13 April 2019) with the exhibition Emersione.

Currently on Artland, 11 of Matteo Gironi's works are available to purchase.

Historical Context of Italy

The classical era of the Romans has exerted a consequential influence on the cultural and intellectual development of Italy, contributing to the uniqueness of the country and its immense artistic heritage. Italy is also the country that embodies the Renaissance, “Riniscita” in its original language, which translates to “rebirth”. From the early 1400s, the Renaissance has been a fervent era of cultural and political flourishing, inducing revivals in art, architecture, music, poetry and philosophy. Although greatly affected by the fascism of Mussolini in the modern and contemporary era, Italy has never lost its place as one of the most essential artistic centres, home to pioneering movements such as Futurism and Arte Povera, as well as the expressive painting of the Transavanguardia and the Minimalism related to the Zero Movement. Some highly influential Italian artists from the twentieth and twenty first centuries include Giorgio Di Chirico, Giacomo Balla, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Giacometti, Lucio Fontana, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino.

Further Biographical Context for Matteo Gironi

Matteo Gironi was born in 1973 and was predominantly influenced creatively by the 1990s. Art in the 1990s was defined at the start of the decade by a group of artists in the United Kingdom that came to be known as the YBAs, or Young British Artists. They were a diverse group of creatives, affiliated loosely by their age, nationality, and their association with Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art in London, as well as being favoured by super collector of the time Charles Saatchi. The most renowned artist of the group is Damien Hirst, who was also an early organiser of group activities. Other artists included Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Gavin Turk, Sarah Lucas and Sam Taylor-Wood. Much of their work became famous for shock tactics and the sensationalism of both material and message. They also became famed for their use of throwaway materials, wild-living, and an attitude that was simultaneously counter-culture rebellion but also entrepreneurial. They gained a large amount of media coverage and dominated British art during the decade. Their international shows in the mid-1990s included the now legendary ‘Sensation'. Conceptual photography led by German ideas and artists came to prominence. Artists such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Wolfgang Tillmans gained international recognition, and inspired other artists such as the Canadian Jeff Wall, who experimented with the kind of cinematic expansiveness associated with the German artists’ work. Painters like Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger exerted a notable influence on less established artists. Also gaining prominence at this time was a developing trend in Japan related to the huge boom in advertising and consumerism that took place during the economic dominance of the 1980s. The indigenous comic book culture of manga, allied to trends in advertising, graphic design and packaging, saw a young artist called Takashi Murakami develop his theories which he coined ’Superflat’. Influenced by his experiences in New York City in the mid-1990s, Murakami was to form an influential collective called Kaikaikiki, which became internationally renowned as an artistic group. Relational Aesthetics became a key idea. It was a term created by curator Nicholas Bourriaud in the 1990s to describe the tendency to make art based on, or inspired by, human relations and their social context. Works by artists including Douglas Gordon, Gillian Wearing, Philippe Parenno and Liam Gillick were described as significant artists who worked to this outline. A proliferation of trends characterised the decade, including the highly irreverent sculpture of Maurizio Cattelan, and highly sensitive advancements of conceptualism as shown in the work of artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres.