Andrea Galvani

Andrea Galvani
© 2014 Mariano Garcia
Born June 4, 1973
Verona, Italy
Residence New York City, New York, U.S. and Mexico City, Mexico
Nationality Italian
Occupation Photographer, Visual Artist

Andrea Galvani (born in Italy 1973) is an international visual artist. He lives and works in New York and Mexico City. Drawing from other disciplines and often assuming scientific methodologies, his conceptual research informs his use of photography, video, drawing, and installation.[1] Galvani’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York, NY; 4th Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art; the Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland; 9th Bienal of Contemporary Art of Nicaragua; Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; The Calder Foundation, New York, NY; Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento, Italy; Macro Museum, Rome, Italy; GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy; De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam; Oslo Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark, among others. In 2011, he received the New York Exposure Prize and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.[2]

Education

Galvani earned a BFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1999, and his MFA in Visual Art from Bilbao University in 2002. He has been a visiting artist at NYU and has completed several artist residencies in New York City, including Location One International Artist Residency Program, the LMCC Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MIA Artist Space Program/Columbia University School of the Arts.[3]

Photography

Andrea Galvani, 2005.

In the last several years Andrea Galvani has worked on the landscape, detracting portions, unfolding and altering the physical perception of the space using a barrage of objects, such as mirrors and reflections of light, balloons, solar panels, gas, smoke and the process of detonation. Suspended in remote and dilated time, the locations seem perturbed by the artist, having done mysterious physical experiments such as violent actions that last for fractions of a second or on the contrary, structural interventions that have fragile properties, which are constructed through a very slow process. In his work the space seems expanded, transformed by the actions, deposited under a new form.

The Higgs Ocean projects

Andrea Galvani, 2009/2010.
"Once it has pierced through the sky and gone through the last layer of the atmosphere, unobstructed light is able to travel infinitely, to the farthest reaches of space."[4]

The Higgs Ocean series documents a unique project staged off the coast of the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic Circle. It required the collaboration of a research institute, two scientists and a crew of 16 people, and was born out of four months of study and preparation with a group of New York-based Russian engineers. Over the course of the 2,800 km sail, the artist used photovoltaic panels to collect and store the natural energy of the limited daily sunlight. He used the accumulated energy to power a flashlight capable of projecting a beam of light over 100,000 ANSI lumens strong. The beam cracked through the Arctic landscape like a bolt of lightning and pierced through the Earth’s atmosphere; within a few minutes, the luminescent memory of the artist’s journey had been returned to the universe. Each photograph in the series records a singular moment in this transfer of energy; they are only simulacra of a process that continues—segments of an infinite vector.[4]

Collaborations

The Skull Sessions

The Skull Sessions[5] are conversations rendered as form. Each Session is a dialogue recorded and reshaped into experimental publications, objects, images, and installations. The project is an ongoing collaboration between Andrea Galvani and Tim Hyde, producing a series of collective works that often involve other artists, architects, scientists, writers, and musicians.[5]

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

(curated by Omar López-Chahoud, guest curatorsAgustín Pérez Rubio, Oliver Martínez Kandt), Managua, Nicaragua)

Calder Foundation Project, New York, NY

Collections

Publications

Selected books

CONVERSAZIONI SULL'IMMAGINE, edited by Luca Panaro, published by Danilo Montanari Editore, April 2013.

Selected magazines

Skull Sessions No. 2, edited by Andrea Galvani and Tim Hyde, published by The Skull Sessions, December 2012.

Quote

"The greatest merit of photography is also its greatest weakness: a fraction of a second is enough to capture an image. The trouble is that it will be completely faithful to the moment to which it belongs and then it’s quite possible that people will be looking at it for dozens or even hundreds of years."[6]

External Links

  1. ↑ NYC Artist Profile for Hercules Universal
  2. ↑ Andrea Galvani's CV
  3. ↑ Education
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Higgs Project.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 The Skull Sessions.
  6. ↑ Andrea Galvani's Invisible Sculptures, The New Yorker, March 2012.