beauty red

source: bomarstudio

Born in Bologna in 1974, Marco Bolognesi now lives and works in London. His studio is located in Bow in East London. Marco Bolognesi is a multimedia artist with experience encompassing drawing, painting, cinema, photography and video. His influences include religious iconography, science fiction, street art, avant-garde manifestos and pop icons.

Bolognesi’s artistic identity is a multi-faceted one. After spending his childhood in an artistic environment and attending DAMS, the school of drama, arts and music in Italy, where he thrived upon a diverse means of expression, he chose for his final thesis to analyse works by the artist and filmmaker Peter Greenaway. In 1994 still in Italy, Bolognesi went on to illustrate a selection of works by the poet Roberto Roversi and the following year he collaborated with the graphic artist Guido Crepax on a comic strip. In 1994 also he shot his first short film, ‘Giustizia e Verità’, on the victims of terrorism, which was subsequently screened at the Venice Biennale. In this experimental documentary, images and music are deeply interwoven, as they are in his second short film on the same theme ‘Il Partito del Silenzio’, which was made in 1996. His overall editing method was so particular and his style so original, that both films were presented in Rome by the Academy Award winning composer Ennio Morricone, and then toured internationally around the Italian Cultural Institutes. Cinema subsequently became Bolognesi’s focus and he soon started working as a director’s assistant for some well known directors, including the controversial Nanni Moretti. Although during this period his fascination with the moving image remained, he decided to explore the potential of still images and the photographic medium.

Bolognesi’s first project as a photographer was working with the theatre playwright and literature Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo. In 2002 he moved to London, where he won the Artist in Residence Award at The Italian Cultural Institute, and undertook his first major photographic project Woodland. Woodland was a cycle of stills in collaboration with fashion designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Kei Kagami and Dolce & Gabbana. These studio images radically blurred the line between tribal art, fetish, punk culture and fashion, using collage techniques to synthesise natural and artificial elements into an imagined breed of hybrid women. In 2006, Woodland was successfully presented in show at the Trafalgar Hotel in London and culminated in the photographic series ‘Synteborg’ in 2007.

In 2008, Bolognesi made the short film Black Hole around the theme of hybrids and cyborgs. This allowed him to further breathe life into his retro-futuristic creations and realise his fantasy vision of a world in which they exist. Since then, his photographic work has been exhibited internationally. As of Summer 2008, one of his stills is being internationally shown as part of the Collezione Farnesina Experimenta, a touring exhibition.

In addition to this, 2008 has seen the International release of DarkStar, Bolognesi’s second photographic publication. DarkStar includes a selection of his photographic works accompanied by a sci-fi short story and essays from a diverse range of journalists and critics.
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source: parmarepubblica

Artista multimediale, la cui arte spazia dal disegno alla pittura, dal cinema alla fotografia e al video, Marco Bolognesi raccoglie a Parma le varie sfaccettature del suo lavoro. Bolognesi trae ispirazione da fonti diverse e contrastanti: è affascinato dall’arte tribale ma anche da quella classica e dall’a vanguardia, dalla cultura fetish, dall’estetica pop, da quella punk ma anche dal fumetto e dalla fantascienza. Se l’imprevedibilità dell’evoluzione futura del genere umano è quello che principalmente interessa all’artista, uno dei tratti distintivi di questa sua personale ricerca è il ruolo da protagonista affidato alla donna, vista come “forza dominante della natura e del futuro” che, grazie alle sue qualità genetiche, dimostra maggiori opportunità e duttilità dell’uomo.

Le storie di Marco Bolognesi sono interpretate da affascinanti ibridi femminili, surreali e meravigliosi. Le sue sono bellezze artificiali e sofisticate dai volti “classici”, rivisti dal mondo elettronico contemporaneo, a volte senza parole e magari senza sguardo, alcune con tratti da geisha, belle e docili ma con qualcosa d’imprevedibile. Sono nuove Barbarelle, donne blu, nude, armate del proprio corpo più che delle loro pistole, delle vere super-eroine o nuove guerriere che insinuano, a chi le guarda, dubbi sull’idea stessa di bellezza, potere, sottomissione, paura e, soprattutto, identità. E le radici di tutto ciò sono da ritrovare, appunto, nel cinema, nel fumetto e naturalmente nella fantascienza.