!["Home sweet home gallery"](https://www.celesteprize.com/indi/_pics/8/9/Articolo-send-01_38950_2005.jpg ""Home sweet home gallery"")
Interviews, United Kingdom, London, 19 August 2013
Information portal "Business Destinations"
http://www.businessdestinations.com/relax/home-sweet-home-gallery/
For most of us, Sunday is a day of rest: a time for family and friends, kicking back at home and recharging the batteries for the week to come. For Bologna-based curator Eugenio Santoro, however, there’s a rather more public dimension to Sundays at home. That’s because his centre storico apartment is not just a place to eat, sleep and raise a family, but a busy exhibition space too, where artists from all over the world present work for sale to a curious public.
Since Santoro founded Museo Orfeo nearly a year ago, exhibition openings that see a crowd of complete strangers pile into the curator’s home have taken place most Sundays. Shows run for a week, with news of what’s on spread by word-of-mouth and via social media. A diverse range of artistic practice is represented, from works on paper, paintings and sculpture to video works projected onto the wall across the road. The only real limitation, says Santoro, is space.
A space for artists
The curator keeps the focus of the gallery broad and its programme dynamic so that he can be as responsive as possible to the “needs of artists”. He was moved to open Museo Orfeo last year after becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of affordable exhibition space in Bologna. Santoro has worked as a freelance curator at venues across the city for many years now (an exhibition he put together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the death of Bologna artist Giorgio Morandi is currently touring Italy, having opened in Bologna earlier this year); running what he calls his “home gallery” gives him such satisfaction precisely because it operates outside of the conventions of traditional gallery spaces.
The Emilia-Romagna capital is home to a respected art school, the Academia di Belle Arte di Bologna, and many of the artists showing work at Museo Orfeo are students or alumni. Santoro showcases not just the work of young and emerging Italian artists, but makers from places as diverse as Iran, China and Sweden. This autumn’s programme includes solo exhibitions from Russian painter Irina Tum (October 6-13) and Hong Kong-based graphic artist Michael Cheung (December 1-31), as well as a photography exhibition, So Faraway So Close, that pairs local photographers Fabio Cappellini and Paola Mischiatti (September 22-29).
The show will contrast Cappellini’s witty, irreverent take on the modern world with Mischiatti’s otherworldly images of bodies in motion. While he looks outward, she looks inward; he works in colour, her photographs are in black and white. Santoro hopes that the juxtaposition will open visitors’ eyes to the broad possibilities of photography as an art form.
He’s also excited about Tum’s show, which will explore Italian identity through a painterly examination of typically Italian objects and contexts. Entitled Another View, the show is intended, Santoro says, “to show Italy to Italians”.
http://www.businessdestinations.com/relax/home-sweet-home-gallery/
For most of us, Sunday is a day of rest: a time for family and friends, kicking back at home and recharging the batteries for the week to come. For Bologna-based curator Eugenio Santoro, however, there’s a rather more public dimension to Sundays at home. That’s because his centre storico apartment is not just a place to eat, sleep and raise a family, but a busy exhibition space too, where artists from all over the world present work for sale to a curious public.
Since Santoro founded Museo Orfeo nearly a year ago, exhibition openings that see a crowd of complete strangers pile into the curator’s home have taken place most Sundays. Shows run for a week, with news of what’s on spread by word-of-mouth and via social media. A diverse range of artistic practice is represented, from works on paper, paintings and sculpture to video works projected onto the wall across the road. The only real limitation, says Santoro, is space.
A space for artists
The curator keeps the focus of the gallery broad and its programme dynamic so that he can be as responsive as possible to the “needs of artists”. He was moved to open Museo Orfeo last year after becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of affordable exhibition space in Bologna. Santoro has worked as a freelance curator at venues across the city for many years now (an exhibition he put together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the death of Bologna artist Giorgio Morandi is currently touring Italy, having opened in Bologna earlier this year); running what he calls his “home gallery” gives him such satisfaction precisely because it operates outside of the conventions of traditional gallery spaces.
The Emilia-Romagna capital is home to a respected art school, the Academia di Belle Arte di Bologna, and many of the artists showing work at Museo Orfeo are students or alumni. Santoro showcases not just the work of young and emerging Italian artists, but makers from places as diverse as Iran, China and Sweden. This autumn’s programme includes solo exhibitions from Russian painter Irina Tum (October 6-13) and Hong Kong-based graphic artist Michael Cheung (December 1-31), as well as a photography exhibition, So Faraway So Close, that pairs local photographers Fabio Cappellini and Paola Mischiatti (September 22-29).
The show will contrast Cappellini’s witty, irreverent take on the modern world with Mischiatti’s otherworldly images of bodies in motion. While he looks outward, she looks inward; he works in colour, her photographs are in black and white. Santoro hopes that the juxtaposition will open visitors’ eyes to the broad possibilities of photography as an art form.
He’s also excited about Tum’s show, which will explore Italian identity through a painterly examination of typically Italian objects and contexts. Entitled Another View, the show is intended, Santoro says, “to show Italy to Italians”.
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