All works for „Imaginifragus“ were finished in Berlin.Īn etching in an edition of twelve will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.The approximately eighty works gathered in Palazzo Fava for “ Sfregi” (Scars), Nicola Samorì’s first major retrospective in Italy, offer a baroque, nonlinear journey through techniques of construction and deconstruction, ruination and transformation, skillfully developed over the past twenty years.

To prepare for his first German solo exhibition at Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Samorì moved his studio from Italy to Berlin temporarily. Kunsthalle Tübingen scheduled a solo show of Samori for autumn 2012. In November, he will exhibit at Pallazzo Reale in Milano in a group exhibition with Nicola De Maria, Mimmo Paladino and Ettore Spalletti. Samorì exhibited in numerous international institutions and museums, most recently in the controversially discussed Italian Pavillon at the 54.

He lives and works in Bagnacavallo near Ravenna, Italy. Nicola Samori was born in Forli, Italy, in 1977 and studied at the Accademia d'Arte in Bologna. By focusing on the materiality and artificiality of the image, Samori negates classical represenation and questions painting itself. Samori builds up his „body of work“ with an abundance of art-historical references and masses of paint just to forcefully destroy them. Physicalness and the body are most important for Samori’s paintings and the process of skinning stresses this importance. But Samori withholds the imaginary „finished“ painting from us and reverses the process of origin drastically: He purposely destroys the image surface, attacks selected parts with a palette-knife, with diluent or with his bare hands until he tears off the (oil-)skin from his painted figures. Still lifes, portraits, devotional paintings and landscapes develop through enormous technical skills over a long span of time and through numerous layers of paint on copper, wood or canvas. Samori’s works often refer to Italian 17th century painting by the selection of motives as well as by his painting technique. We are pleased to invite you to „Imaginifragus“, Nicola Samoris’s first German solo exhibition at the Gallery Christian Ehrentraut, on October 28th.

Nicolas samori paintings