Yaprak Akinci Meditative Solitude of Subconscious
International Confederation of Art Critics 1
Yaprak Akinci
Front cover: “Urbe XI” by Yaprak Akinci, 2012 Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 120 cm 2
Yaprak Akinci
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Yaprak Akinci
ICAC
International Confederation of Art Critics
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Yaprak Akinci Meditative Solitude of Subconscious
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Yaprak Akinci
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Contents
The Artist
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‘Hypnotic Metaphors of Moral Collapse’
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Mia Carey Cupic, International Confederation of Art Critics
‘Avant-Garde Revivals of Sublime Ruins’
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Elena Foschi, Art Historian
‘Il Risveglio - Awakening’
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Short Film, “L’Arte Genera l’Arte”, Winner of the Premio Terna 04 - 2012
Artwork analysis
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Timothy Warrington, International Confederation of Art Critics
Exhibitions & Awards
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List of Works
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Edited by the International Confederation of Art Critics 7
Yaprak Akinci
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“Beccegato wants to suggest something, he wants to talk to us, to leave a message. Maybe he is underlining the enigma of life, its great mystery, its unsolved question. In fact, we must not be mislead by the appearance of his paintings; he has a considerable cultural and philosophical background. He knows how to restore dignity to man and to his drama, and maybe, looking at his canvases and his paintings, wouldn’t Isaac Singer be right in affirming that man is God’s mistake.
“My interest in drawing began very early, just as soon I was Beccegato’s has his own strength, his able to pick up coloured pens, pencils andman illustration books. own consciousness. His faces have a calm I always found myself enthralledwisdom, by thethey models and drawings seem to meditate about life of my grandparents, who were both architects and death thoughtfully, in and, silence. from Beccegatoa young age, decided that I wanted toabout study art or design talks emotional tensions, that at he himself feelsartistic inside, and he expresses them Mimar Sinan, Turkey’s most prestigious university.” with great conviction.”
Yaprak Akinci
Mario Stefani (1938-2001) “Poetic Traces”, 1998
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Yaprak Akinci
Yaprak Akinci
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The Artist
Turkish contemporary artist Yaprak Akinci was born in Istanbul, 1984. Akinci is a graduate of the prestigious Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University with a degree in graphic design who explores her creative pathway through a multitude of techniques, ranging from painting, drawing, photography and cinema to engraving. In 2010, Akinci moved to Rome and completed a Master’s Degree in Graphic Arts at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, where painting became the focus of her artistic output. Years of painstaking observation of her home city saw the artist bear witness to unfettered architectural growth with frantic urban transformation that profoundly affected her work. In 2012, Akinci received the ‘’Arte Genera Arte’’ prize at the fourth edition of the Premio Terna. In 2013, she was a finalist of the Premio Pittura INAIL, the Premio Fibrenus, as well as the UbqArt Award in 2015. Akinci’s artworks have been selected for exhibition in numerous shows in Istanbul, Rome, London and Carrara. In 2015, Akinci moved to London where, in 2017, she exhibited at Art Rooms.
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Hypnotic Metaphors of Moral Collapse Mia Carey Cupic International Confederation of Art Critics
Yaprak Akinci’s extraordinary body of artwork demonstrates an evolving and flourishing artistic practice. This brilliant young Turkish artist manifests endless talent through her broad range of aesthetic elements and study of shape and reflection. Akinci vividly conveys her deeper imaginative intentions embodying contrasting creative avenues, from provocative photographs and refined engravings to striking installations and paintings. Transferring an enigmatic and irretrievably damaged world onto canvas, Akinci highlights contemporary ruins as a critical focal point to communicate sensitive and delicate issues. Akinci’s oeuvre traverses many divergent styles with the ability of evoking an endless variety of creative stimuli that absorb and captivate the spectator. Taking inspiration from preliminary photographs, Akinci vigorously reinterprets what she captured on camera into expressive and vibrant paintings. Intensely influenced by industrial areas, this artist immortalises particular perspectives of obscure crude oil plants, obsolete workshops, excavations, forgotten railway lines and abandoned buildings, investigating the unfathomable souls of these deserted modern ruins.
Opposite: Favelas, 2011 Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 cm 15
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Hypnotic Metaphors of Moral Collapse
Thus, each shot directly leads Akinci to a deep alteration process that culminates in thoughtful artworks which outline and enhance the skeleton of metropolitan views. Albeit the fierce final result, Akinci’s cityscapes remain ambiguous shadows of overpowering and profound derelict vistas, with anonymous figures and intangible structures, like a blurry remembrance of a previously perceived reality. Expanding her personal artistic cosmos, Akinci’s philosophy echoes the acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer, whose creations inspired by urban landscapes and colossal industrial spaces evoke the linear abstraction and darkness in Akinci’s compositions. Similarly to Kiefer, who finds expression through alternative and symbolically charged material, the viewer bears witness to overpowering forsaken scenes in Akinci’s artworks, largely accomplished through her unique choice of medium and artistic technique. The soft texture achieved with the eloquent use of oil bars and the intensity of the brushwork allow for a truly exceptional and dynamic artistic conception that emphasises depth and that becomes the threshold into a fabled, otherworldly realm. Undeniably, the viewers feel immersed in the distant but familiar ruins captured by Akinci’s unique expressive vision.
Opposite: Petroleum, 2013 Oil bar on canvas, 80 x 60 cm
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Critique
Hypnotic Metaphors of Moral Collapse The shadowy amalgamation of lines and forms, infused with murky shades of grey, blacks and browns, creates a profound impact that distorts our notion of reality. Altogether, her paintings portray an indistinct and ambiguous structural atmosphere that is hazy and out-of-focus, both visually and metaphorically. The pictorial surface is visually enigmatic with non-figurative appearances that provoke a dreamlike experience and catalyse relentless ideas perforating deep into one’s subliminal consciousness. Saturated with allegories, Akinci’s paintings illustrate the immeasurable flaws in mankind via a story of unrestricted architectural development and frantic metropolitan transformation. Her dramatic structures reflect potent philosophical principles related to life and death, creation and demolition, urban revival and anarchy - corrupted landscapes that incorporate destructive elements of a forgotten world, suggesting loss and neglect, that is conveyed by a unique and powerful artistic language that radiates inherent beauty and poetic silence. Finally, Akinci’s paintings portray extremely forceful enigmas, with hidden depths and perspective receding as far as the eye can see, in a powerful succession of sharp lines, intersecting forcefully, and soaring high. Set amid a barren landscape these immense structures are traversing, exploding and dispersing into exhausts of bold hues, reminiscent of corrosive fumes emitted from uncontrolled development.
Opposite: Prone, 2016 (with detail) Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 63 cm
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Yaprak Akinci
Above: Upstairs, 2013 Oil bar on canvas, 110 x 95 cm 20
Opposite: Photograph XV Installation by the artists Doug & Mike Starn
Hypnotic Metaphors of Moral Collapse Albeit the veiled soul of Akinci’s deepest emotions, the viewer can contemplate notions of harmony and peace, belittled in today’s world of increasing greed and chaos. Moral and social collapse is the underlying message that intersects and unites Akinci’s artistic expression, whose complex philosophy is ultimately conveyed through postapocalyptic scenarios of a desolate society resting on the precarious pillars of a deplorable modern metamorphosis.
Mia Carey Cupic International Confederation of Art Critics
Deepa Khanna Sobti
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Yaprak Akinci
Untitled, 2013 Acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm
Photograph XIII 22
Photograph XII
Untitled, 2013 Acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm
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Yaprak Akinci
Photograph XIV
Untitled sketch, 2011
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Neighbours, 2011 Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm 25
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Stability, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 120 cm
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Yaprak Akinci
Photograph VI
Opposite: Acciaio, 2013 Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 80 cm
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Yaprak Akinci
“What was I going to paint? The answer did not take long to find. From the very beginning, I started collecting images and this would soon become an obsession. I built up a collection of images of industrial areas, some through my own photographs and others simply picked up from any available source. Before long, I had compiled a file with images of oil refineries, factories, mines, slums and abandoned buildings, as well as repetitive shapes and abstract images.� Yaprak Akinci
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Mass Division II, 2017 Acrylic on canvas, 182 x 66 cm
Mass Division I, 2017 Acrylic on canvas, 182 x 66 cm
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Togetherness, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 120 cm
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Avant-Garde Revivals of Sublime Ruins Elena Foschi Art Historian
Deserted architectural scenarios have always evoked meditative sensations that the German writer Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe associated with the overwhelming feeling of the “sublime�. In fact, Goethe anticipated the obsession with majestic past glories and the revival of an idealised lost Golden Age that inspired 19th century poets and intellectuals. Yaprak Akinci, with her evocative and fierce artworks, conveys the same intense frustration and melancholic sentiment towards contemporary society, as did Romantics over two centuries earlier. In her sharp representations of architectural fragments and structural fractions, this accomplished artist reveals an uncorrupted passion for present-day ruins, portrayed as decadent wrecks of a dissolute humanity. The fascination with abandoned monuments seems to be inspired by the great Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose depictions of Roman ancient magnificence were a subtle denunciation of the ethical inadequacy towards the most virtuous of ancestors. While Piranesi was marking a new historical consciousness, Akinci is highlighting a current and factual crisis of values.
Opposite: Urbe VIII, 2011 Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm 37
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Avant-Garde Revivals of Sublime Ruins Notwithstanding an undeniable attraction for the collateral beauty hidden in angular shapes of abandoned items, Akinci’s body of work reflects a social criticism but perhaps also an unspoken admiration or curiosity towards the creator of those terrific buildings. Manifestations of an omnipresent consumerism, her paintings insinuate the artist’s stupor in realising that what she is seeing is part of a shelved and forgotten project, a fragment of a whole and significant scheme that for unfamiliar reasons have been left behind. Therefore, a profound discrepancy between a commemorated ruin and decrepit architectures appears: Akinci’s work glorifies and exalts the visual contamination of pure environments, disrupted by disturbing unfinished forms. A paradise lost in a dehumanized and degraded future, where colours and emotions have been destroyed by a silent and unknown cataclysm. This emotional effect provoked by Akinci’s scenarios is fortified by her wise use of the sfumato technique to fade the contours and dissolve the lines.
Opposite: Security, 2014 (with detail) Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 70 cm
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Detail of Untitled, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 100 cm
Wondrous perspectives create a distance in time, enhancing the apocalyptic and visionary atmosphere. Thus, Akinci’s paintings aid us in a deeper understanding of the laceration emerged from human passage on earth. Her universe is emotionally charged with a profound expressionist distortion - the bare landscapes combine some eloquent and dramatic Post-Impressionistic representations with the vibrant and dynamic brush strokes by Gino Severini. So, geometric essentials and Italian Futurism melt together in perfect harmony in Yaprak’s unique spatial partitions. Her three-dimensional ambiguity stimulates a personal and constantly evolving creative inspiration that culminates in an extraordinary pictorial Deconstructivism.
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Akinci gives life to a genuine interpretation of the fragile boundary between reality and imagination, that smoothly dissolves through the thin layer of perception. As in Plato’s theory of Forms, we can only perceive the authentic essence of an entity if we go beyond the shadows of a distorted and prejudiced observation. Despite the collapse of civilization, the beauty of chaos is breathtaking and unexpected. Ultimately, Yaprak Akinci’s portrayals are far from an imitation of the perceived world: her audacious intersecting strokes echo a collective subconscious, a contemporary chimera fuelled by introspective memories. Elena Foschi Art Historian
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Receding, 2016 Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 63 cm
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Antenna, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 90 cm
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Yaprak Akinci
Above: Photograph III Opposite: Untitled, 2014 Acrylic on juta, 60 x 60 cm
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Il Risveglio - Awakening
“One day as I was walking down the stairs leading to the banks of the Tiber, I stumbled across an abandoned piano. From a young age I had dreamed of being able to play the piano. The instrument I found before me was battered and filthy, while only a handful of its keys were in working order. The hammers were uncovered and would produce jarring notes upon impact with the rusty strings. The piano, I thought, must have had a fascinating life, a life that no longer existed, with no-one around to play it or to listen to its melodies....
At that moment, I decided to bring it back to life,
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...At that moment, I decided to bring it back to life, to revive it through painting. If its keys could no longer produce harmonic sounds, it could at least produce a harmony of colours to be experienced visually. Those close to it, seagulls, the river and the trees lining the banks of the Tiber, would have front row seats for its silent concert, while the piano would resume its most crucial function - bringing art to life.’’ ‘Il Risveglio- Awakening’, Short Film - 2012 Winner of “L’Arte Genera l’Arte”, Premio Terna 04 Rome, Italy 52
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Untitled, 2013 Acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm
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Untitled, 2013 Acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm
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Yaprak Akinci
Engraving II, 2010-2012
Opposite: Trap, 2013 Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 65 cm 56
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Unlocked, 2013 (with detail) Oil bar on canvas, 120 x 120 cm
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Artwork Analysis Timothy Warrington International Confederation of Art Critics
Yaprak’s meditative paintings explore and challenge the process of the artist’s journey towards self-discovery, whilst engaging a fervent instinctive drive to discover a complex, cohesive and visceral style. One is reminded of the nonrepresentational dynamic visions created by Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso and most prominently, the German artist Gerhard Richter. Both Richter and Yaprak obscure and erase to both conceal and reveal not only the abundance of layers literally, but also the infinite psychological dimensions that are rooted deep within our minds. Yaprak’s emotionally efficacious and alluring painting, ‘Unlocked’, is recognised for its extremely progressive, high powered and strenuous inclusions of line, form and movement, that appear sublime in its industrial and immersive aura.
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Artwork Analysis This instantly activates an electric current that revives an energising sense of awareness from within the viewer. The celestial illusory space in the painting is portrayed at once - beautifully, deceptively and naturally. Yaprak’s paintings show immense talent and skill in capturing the soul of an unsatisfactory world and finding the beauty between the lines. Hope is on the horizon and the blushing warm light promises a salvation, which is synchronously enduring and eternal, fleeting and ephemeral. Staring into the pictorial abyss of this artwork, the spectator is drawn into the cumulative layers of its textural and non-representational skeleton. Sweeping masses of delicate colours that reflect onto the canvas appear to evolve into separate entities - notably, the coincidental details and random patterns intrigue and stimulate the observer. “Unlocked” shows an impressive culmination of spontaneous and explosive gestures, directly resulting from Yaprak’s technique. A thick brume surrounds the lines, at times dense and suffocating or fluid and delicate, in a caliginous aura illuminated by a humble sun, reminiscent of Claude Monet’s atmospheric effects. These structural and vigorous strokes of shadows transmit pure passion, dedication, and spirit of the artist. Whilst the agglomeration of paint may appear spontaneous and immediate, Akinci’s composition is the undeniable result of meticulous artistic composure, study, thought and expertise, urging the spectator to admire the riveting nature of its brilliant aesthetic quality and visual impact.
Timothy Warrington International Confederation of Art Critics
Opposite: Detail of Unlocked, 2013 Oil bar on canvas, 120 x 120 cm 61
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Photograph XI
Untitled Sketch, 2011
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Untitled, 2012 Oil bar on canvas, 150 x 120 cm
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Certainty, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 140 x 90 cm
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Relief, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 70 cm
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Yaprak Akinci
Yaprak akinci, prize winner at UbqArt, italy - 2015
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Exhibitions & Awards
SOLO EXHIBITIONS • 2014, Remnants, Cultural Office of the Turkish Embassy, Rome, Italy GROUP EXHIBITIONS • 2017, Art Rooms, London, United Kingdom • 2013, Factory Festival, MACRO, Rome, Italy • 2012, Affordable Art Fair AOP Project (Live Painting Performance), MACRO, Rome, Italy • 2012, 3rd International Art Dialogues, Galata Square Workshop, Istanbul, Turkey AWARDS •
2015, UbqArt Award 3rd Place, Italy
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2013, INAIL Painting Award Finalist, Italy
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2013, XXVII FIBRENUS Finalist, Italy
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2012, Winner of Premio Terna 04, L’Arte Genera l’Arte’ with the Short Film ‘Il Risveglio’, Rome, Italy
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“The mind imagines, creates or manifests what it believes and finally sees through its beliefs and takes a rest. In this period of rest, it knows it contains all.� Deepa Khanna Sobti
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Yaprak Akinci
List of Works Untitled, acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm, 2013
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Away, Oil bar on canvas, 75 x 60 cm, 2013
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Urbe X, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 90 cm, 2012 Untitled sketch, 2011
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Favelas, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 cm, 2011
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Petroleum, Oil bar on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, 2013
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Prone, Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 63 cm, 2016
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Upstairs, Oil bar on canvas, 110 x 95 cm, 2013
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Photograph XV - Installation by the artists Doug & Mike Starn
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Untitled, acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm, 2013
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Photograph XIII
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Untitled, acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm, 2013
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Photograph XII
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Photograph XIV
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Untitled sketch, 2011
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Neighbours, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 90 cm, 2011
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Stability, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 120 cm, 2014
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Photograph VI
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Acciaio, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, 2013
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Mass Division II, acrylic on canvas, 182 x 66 cm, 2017
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Mass Division I, acrylic on canvas, 182 x 66 cm, 2017
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Togetherness, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 120 cm, 2014
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Engraving I, 2010-2012
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List of Works Urbe VIII, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm, 2011
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Security, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 70 cm, 2014
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Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 100 cm, 2014
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Urbe XIII, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 120 cm, 2011
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Receding, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 63 cm, 2016
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Antenna, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 90 cm, 2014
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Subsiding, acrylic on canvas, 73 x 118 cm, 2017
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Photograph III
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Untitled, acrylic on juta, 60 x 60 cm, 2014
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Il Risveglio - Awakening, Short Film, 2012
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Untitled, acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm, 2013
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Untitled, acrylic on paper, 42 x 30 cm, 2013
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Engraving II, 2010-2012
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Trap, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 65 cm, 2013
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Unlocked, Oil bar on canvas, 120 x 120 cm, 2013
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Photograph XI
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Untitled Sketch, 2011
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Untitled, Oil bar on canvas, 150 x 120 cm, 2012
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Transparency, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 100 cm, 2014
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Certainty, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 90 cm, 2014
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Relief, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 70 cm, 2014
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Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 136 cm, 2017
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Edited and published by International Confederation of Art Critics London, 2017 Copyright © 2017 International Confederation of Art Critics Layout by Elena Foschi www.international-confederation-art-critics.org
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