OVER 20 YEARS OF HISTORY
Artopiagallery has the desire to offer new tools to read and understand today’s reality, to deepen global or individual issues, to reflect on who we are and what we have near, and also to create parallels with different temporal dimensions. Interpreting the relationship between space and time, highlighting the stakes of art, in the broadest sense of the term, as solutions to find the balance lost within the chaos of contemporary life.
And from this intent a broad and interdisciplinary cultural program is born, in which space is given to new artistic grounds such as cinema, performance, architecture and design.
Artopia opens in February 2001 with Marzia Migliora's exhibition In punta di piedi (On tiptoes), curated by Emanuela de Cecco.
The gallery arises to the attention of the public and critics already from the beginning of its activity because of the interest set in the Balkan and Middle-East artistic scene, proposing emerging artists for the first time. The site-specific projects - among others, those of Adrian Paci, Phil Collins, Maja Bajević and Jelena Tomašević - created around the unusual nature of the exhibition space privilege themes as home, its loss, sense of belonging and identity.
And then to artists who with their eyes and their projects go beyond the boundaries of a comfort zone, the traditional category "art", such as Alice Anderson, Zapruder, Julie Béna, Cristian Chironi, Jean-Baptiste Maitre, Elizabeth McAlpine, Johannes Wald, Martinelli Venezia, Dina Danish.
Marzia Migliora, 59 passi, 2001, videoproiezione, 3 min.
The gallery after two decades rereads in March 2021 its own history in I love the gallery - 20th anniversary exhibition, a visual timeline through a series of works selected from the gallery’s collection. It involves artists with whom it has written and shared its research and looks ahead to continue working within a new and eclectic space aimed at the future, which confirms the twenty-year professional and personal commitment. This new environment, a former laboratory of late 1800, located in the courtyard of the building that also houses the current headquarters of Artopia, will be renovated in 2023 with a project signed by the Milanese studio Martinelli Venezia.
I love the gallery - 20th anniversary exhibition, 2021 | Photo by: Riccardo Pasciucco