Strange Opera


Visual art returns to canvases and it is tinted with strong colors that outline a generation grown up with manga and Disney characters.

Strange Opera presents a new approach to art that mixes the highest and most elitist culture with pop.

During the ’70s in the U.S.A. the concept of lowbrow art was born, thanks to Robert Williams who identified in his art a derivation from the bottom with no aspiration compared to the abstract concepts locked up in contemporary art museums. That art, which developed in the urban underground, had a more direct and more immediate language for the public that, for this reason, recognized it and felt it as its own.

An art that sprung from the customization of surfboards and Harley Davidson motorcycles, from tattoos and comics and that mingled with the tradition of nineteenth-century illustration, Mexican surrealism, adding European gothic aspects and, dominating everything, there was and there is pop, in the sense of popular and recognizable.

Lowbrow art continues to evolve and develop the ferments it feeds on: street art, tattoo art, illustration, comics, tiki art, movies, videogames and raises in a sophisticated language that searches for the symbolism of Renaissance culture while still being committed to everyday expressions, technique becomes more elaborate and mixes state of the art technology with 16th century research: pop surrealism is born.

Lowbrow art and pop surrealism have brought the figure back to the center of the artistic expression, a renewed Renaissance that spreads thanks to the internet: the Vitruvian man is not locked up in the perfect measurements of the circle and the square, but he is in a dialogue with a binary language, facing a communicational and relational evolution that forces him to take refuge in known forms.

A curatorial project that was born in Rome with Rossana Calbi, artistic director of the association, whose purpose is to present a new sensitivity by researching similar phenomena in designated spaces and not an artistic expression that belongs to our subconscious.


The Expo

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