Venetian artistry showcased through works by Mauro Bonaventura and Davide Battistin.
VCE goes to DXB is an exhibition that will open its doors on the 16th of November in Dubai and will mark the start of an active dialogue between the two cities, fostered and nurtured by AKKA Project. This cultural exchange will happen biannually, bringing the Venetian artistic scene to Dubai and vice versa, deepening the relationship and creating an intimate relationship between these two seemingly disparate places.
The first instalment of this interchange will pay tribute and reveal the work of two renowned Venetian artists – glass sculptor Mauro Bonaventura and painter Davide Battistin. Despite coming from inherently different artistic backgrounds, their practices convey a similar temporal element, alluding to Venice’s prominent past as well as looking to bring these elements within a contemporary context.
Dubai and Venice could be seen as two cities placed at different points in time. Whereas Venice seems to be an artefact of a moment in the past, Dubai appears to be a glimpse of a future. And yet this contrasting quality between the two allows for a dynamic exchange, in which these different temporalities intertwine through the placement of Bonaventura and Battistin’s works in an unfamiliar context.
Both artists are particularly dedicated to the study of light and colour play and its poetic quality, be it the way in which the light goes through the glass or the manner in which it reflects in the vivid brushstrokes, mimicking the lagoon. The fragility of the very materiality of Bonaventura’s works is somehow reflected intangibly, in the slipping moments that Battistin tries to capture. The themes explored by the two artists allude to liberation and fragility of the moment.
Different in the artistic nature and yet similar in the themes explored, the two artists will bring Venetian artistry and craftsmanship – be it Bonaventura’s glass lamp-working technique or Battistin’s paintings of the Venetian lagoon – to the shores of Dubai at Akka Project and it is not to be missed.
In collaboration with Linea d’Acqua Venezia.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Mauro Bonaventura
Mauro Bonaventura was born in 1965 in Italy where he still currently lives and works. Bonaventura’s works seem to unleash an almost contrasting tension that, on one hand, clings to and envelops his figures with the multi-coloured snarls that entangle them and yet, on the other, opens the doors of another world, of faraway freedom, perhaps the most important, that of ideas and the spirit.
Davide Battistin
Born in Venice in 1970, Davide Battistin graduated in 1998 from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. Davide’s paintings convey the shiver of an icy winter’s morning with the lights in the distance behind the fog, the heat of the torrid sun that goes down behind the palazzi of the Grand Canal, flooding its waters with a dense, melancholy pink. His horizons are lost in an infinite distance that sinks into the motionless mystery of the lagoon fogs.