selected group exhibitions-.
Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna,
Bologna, IT, 2021
A century-long journey through Italian art, with drawing as the guiding thread: 141 works by 141 artists mark the stages of the "story in images" that unfolds in this book, ranging from 1909 to 2020 and spanning the most important artistic experiences and movements of the twentieth century, from Futurism to Arte Povera, right up to the present day.
Each image is accompanied by a reflection from the author - unprecedented with contemporary artists - on the theme of drawing; a theme that is also explored and expressed from different perspectives in the texts by Maura Pozzati and Claudio Musso, curators of the project. Maura Pozzati proposes a reflection on drawing that does not separate "the ideational moment from the executive, the thought process from that of the hand" and that highlights the specific features of this technique compared to others: drawing uses simple means to give life to "fragile works if we think of the support, yet endowed with great poetry and compositional equilibria; a space of experimentation, of soul-searching and secrets, captured in the moment when the hand is available and agile". Claudio Musso chooses to recount the "ungraspable path of drawing" from three points of view - drawing as an object, drawing as a project, drawing as a subject – underlining how drawing is "a twoway path, as it makes it possible to introject through the knowledge of the existent, but at the same time, it is the most effective medium by which to exteriorise one’s own individuality".
The exhibition is organised by the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna as part of the Art City Bologna 2021 programme.
Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna,
Bologna, IT, 2019
The Italian landscape in the history of contemporary art, with a dialogue between the paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs and installations of artists born between the ’60s and’ 80s and a core of works created by prominent figures of the twentieth century. From January to April 2019, the Fondazione del Monte of Bologna and Ravenna promote the exhibition “Panorama. Approvers and drifts of the landscape in Italy “, by Claudio Musso. Fifty works on display by 17 contemporary artists who are confronted with the industrial scenarios of Antonio Sant’Elia, a large canvas by Mario Schifano, some iconic shots by Luigi Ghirri and the dystopian projects of Superstudio.
DeerHuntLandscapes, 2005/2006
SL_playerUnknownBattlegrounds 28.03.2018, 2018
...Ceolin is a digital artist with two works presented together in the exhibition. DeerHuntLandscapes is an installation featuring boxes full of archival images, and an acrylic on Plexiglas painting of a landscape screenshot from the Deer Hunter video game. The Plexiglas and plastic acrylic paint is reminiscent of the ‘virtuality’ of a screen. SL_playerUnknownBattlegrounds 28.03.2018 is a watercolour and gouache painting, also of a Deer Hunter ‘landscape’. The paintings are screenshots of 32 and 16 bit images respectively, and Ceolin’s use of watercolour and gouache is intended to reflect the lower 16 bit screen-quality. The use of digital landscapes shows how our perception of the theme has evolved in the digital age. Both images initially appear like en-plein-air paintings, and there is a certain beauty in the transferal of a pixelated image into a tangible painting..
Parc de Clères, parc zoologique et botanique, Clères, F, 2014
Avec Darrren Almond, Alice Anderson, Sylvaine Branellec, Mauro Ceolin, Claude Closky, Pierre Corroenne, Rodolphe Delaunay, Mark Dion, Cevdet Erek, Geert Goiris, Anne-Marie Jugnet et Alain Clairet, Olivier Leroi, Wesley Meuris, Hugues Reip,Thomas Ruff, Batia Suter.
L'exposition Les explorateurs fait écho à la personnalité de Jean Delacour et à l'identité du lieu. Elle réunit des artistes qui s'interessent aux sciences naturelles, depuis la zoologie à l'astronomie en passant par la géologie. Il s'agit aussi pour certains, de repenser la manière de présenter les savoirs. En portant un regard à la fois scientifique et artistique sur ces domaine, ces artistes interrogent leur statut et leur pratique à la croisées des sciences. en Cela, ils semblent renouer avec la tradition des amateurs éclairés, qui étaient à la fois artistes, scientifiques, inveteurs, sans ue l'une de ces spécialités ne prennent le pas sur une autre.
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art in
collaboration with Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2014
Eternal September presents a wide range of artworks, spanning almost all artistic media: paintings, photographs, videos, software art, installations, performances and web based projects.
...Eternal September is an attempt to acknowledge the revolution that is subverting today’s visual culture, a colorful, messy eruption that is rapidly sweeping away all the landmarks on the art-scape. The show does not offer any new certainties, though: it’s more an invitation to get stuck in together and start figuring things out.
...Since 2006, Milan based artist Mauro Ceolin has been working on contemporaryNaturalism, a complex, ongoing research project exploring the analogies between science and technology, studying the way ideas develop in the online environment using methodologies and taxonomies taken from biology, with the ambition to develop a better knowledge of what he calls “silicon based life”. First presented at the roBOt06 Festival in Bologna in 2013, Memezoology is a multimedia installation focused on the strange, viral and pervasive history of memes, in a fascinating attempt to build a taxonomy of collective imagination through contemporary folk imagery. In the words of curator Claudio Musso: “With an analytical eye, Ceolin chooses cases that have become “viral” as a result of countless versions created from a common template. Our imagination expands thanks to the emergence of new (even synthetic) life forms. Another evolutionary breakthrough is looming. For Homo Digitalis it is not difficult to be surrounded by wildlife created by film, television or video games, easily contributing to a meme’s survival.”
roBOt06 Festival - digital paths into music and arts.
Palazzo Re Enzo, Cappella di S. Maria dei Carcerati,
Bologna, IT, 2013
Mauro Ceolin : Evolutionary (dis)order. "Memezoology" fits within the research project contemporaryNaturalism, active since 2006 with the goal of certifying the existence of a "biology of the imaginary collective" and the spread of memes in mainstream media. With an analytical eye, Ceolin chooses cases that have become "viral" as a result of countless versions created from a common template. Our imagination expands thanks to the emergence of new (even synthetic) life forms. Another evolutionary breakthrough is looming. For Homo Digitalis it is not difficult to be surrounded by wildlife created by film, television or video games and, likewise, it easily.
54th Venice Art Biennale, Sala dei Lanieri, Venezia, IT, 2011
ITALIANS DO IT BETTER!! is an alternative Italian Pavilion. This irreverent and slightly subversive retrospective celebrates the work of several artists who have been experimenting and exploiting game-based technologies for more than two decades. ITALIANS DO IT BETTER!! pays homage to Italian videogame-based art interventions. Visitors will get a chance to see the past, present and, possibly, future of indigenous game-based art, in analog and digital form, on canvas and on screen. This is seriously playful art.
... Mauro Ceolin started to focus on game culture in 2002, portraying the game designers who made the history of videogames: faces and names unknown to most people, like Will Wright or Shigeru Miyamoto, that Ceolin celebrates as culture heroes. This first work was followed by the memorable series SolidLandscapes (2005 – 2011), in which he painted the landscapes where he lived inside the screen as if they were real. CARTRIDGEdream (2005), presented in the exhibition, is a small masterpiece of recycling scrap: old game cartridges, modeling components, and spam emails are reassembled to spawn a new cultural artifact.
BWA Galeria Awangarda. Wroclaw, Poland, 2009
The video game is not only an entertainment, but also a form of communication. Author uses it as a language and as a media to communicate and to describe the reality. RGBwebroids2 is not a surrealistic videogame. It describes a real web-social scenery. Ceolin describes this Internet war with his favourite language: the videogame. This media allows the artist to describe facts, real situations with a brief, fast and ironic language which everybody can understand.
Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Mallorca, Illes Balears, ES, 2008
4th Triennial of Photography, Hamburg, D, 2008
In his Landscape Series, Mauro Ceolin explores the different aspects of landscape in our globalized, capitalist, contamined, digital era. Drawing with a digital pen and tablet, he recreates the images he collects from different sources: landscapes from commercial videogames, the buildings of the main companies in the market of technology and the many natural disasters caused by man. His work involves an exploration of the digital with a very traditional, manual process.
Mauro Ceolin (Milano, 1963) has exhibited his work in many art centers and galleries in Italy and worldwide, as well as in the art fairs Artissima, MiArt, Flash Art fair and FIAC, and severla digital art festivals. Johan&Levi has recently published a book about his work.
VertexList gallery, Brooklyn New York, USA, 2007
Leonard Pearlstein Gallery/Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, 2008
a group exhibition celebrating the history of the digital image, the aesthetics of early computing and early video-game consoles. Expect pixels, old monitors and 8 bit sounds!
Cory Arcangel, Chris Ashley, Mike Beradino, Mauro Ceolin, Petra Cortright, Paul Davis, DELAWARE, Notendo (Jeff Donaldson), Eteam, Dragan Espenschied, Christine Gedeon, Kimberley Hart, Daniel Iglesia, JODI, Olia Lialina, LoVid, Kristin Lucas, David Mauro, Jillian Mcdonald, Tom Moody, Aron Namenwirth, Mark Napier, Nullsleep, Marisa Olson, Will Papenheimer, Prize Budget for Boys, Jim Punk, Akiko Sakaizumi, Paul Slocum, Eddo Stern and CJ Yeh..
Kunsthalle CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Illes Balears, ES, 2008
... Inspired by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Mauro Ceolin dedicates this series to the investigation of the representation of fluids. But he does it, as is habitual in his work, through the products of popular culture. In this case, the Manga and the Anime are the source from which he extracts all kinds of images of fluids, whether water, gases, or pure energy. Ceolin extracts these forms from their context, depriving them of their figurative character to become beautiful abstract compositions in which, nevertheless, subsist a subtle identification with the comic’s own language and that of Japanese animation. The artist chooses for this work an effective combination of manual digital processes, that go from the vectorial drawing to the collage and the mural painting. Mauro Ceolin has created two large pieces specifically for this exposition, thanks to a stay at the workshops of the CCA.
MAXXI, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, IT, 2006
Gioco e arte spesso si confondono nella Rete. Composizioni grafiche e testuali nascono e si sviluppano seguendo percorsi liberi di gioco in cui diventa indispensabile l’interazione da parte del navigatore. Frequente nella net web art l’aspetto ludico diventa strumento per rivelare aspetti e contenuti legati alla cultura contemporanea. Questo appuntamento esplora alcuni aspetti del gioco dell'arte in Rete, attraverso la presentazione di sei opere di artisti significativi del panorama internazionale. Le opere selezionate saranno visibili presso i computer del museo e sul sito http://www.darc.beniculturali.it.
...Ceolin riprende Tetris, uno dei giochi interattivi che hanno fatto la storia del videogame e lo manipola, sostituendo dei loghi alle figurazioni geometriche dell’originale.
... Mauro Ceolin (Italia) utilizza sia tecniche tradizionali sia i new media, con una particolare predilezione per l’universo video ludico. I suoi lavori sono stati esposti in numerose gallerie e musei del mondo tra cui il Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Caracas e il Media Art Center di Seattle.
Civic Gallery, Monza, IT, 2006
The Civic Gallery in Monza is pleased to present GameScapes. Videogame Landscapes and Cities in the Works of Five International Artists, an exhibition of work by five artists working with videogames. Curated by Rosanna Pavoni with the collaboration of Matteo Bittanti and Domenico Quaranta, GameScapes investigates the notion of digital games, space, and urban environments in in our hyper-mediated age. Comprised of paintings, installations, and projections, the exhibition space will be transformed into a real-life gamespace.
Included in the exhibition are a video installation by Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Movie (2004), a series of paintings by Mauro Ceolin from the SolidLandscapes(2004-) series, Carlo Zanni’s interactive installation Average Shoeveler (2004), Eddo Stern’s recent machinima Landlord Vigilante (2006) and the entire series of Jon Haddock’s seminal Screenshots (1999). Most of these artworks have never been presented in Italy before.
Johan & Levi is publishing the GameScapes catalog which features new commentary texts by Rosanna Pavoni, Matteo Bittanti, and Domenico Quaranta.
Piemonte Share Festival
Palazzo Cavour, Torino, IT, 2005
Sharing, la Regione Piemonte, la Provincia e il Comune di Torino, organizzano la prima edizione di PIEMONTE_SHARE_FESTIVAL dedicato alla cultura digitale e ai new media. PIEMONTE SHARE FESTIVAL rappresenta l’edizione italiana dei più importanti festival internazionali.
...GameScenes propone una mostra con opere di arte figurativa come i Solid_Landscapes del milanese Mauro Ceolin e i New York Romscapes di Jeremiah Johnson alias nullsleep; videogiochi d’artista, come The Great Game dell’americano Jon Klima, sulla guerra in Afganistan, e Vigilance 1.0, un gioco sulla videosorveglianza del francese Martin Le Chevallier; giochi modificati, dalla versione per Wolfenstein di My Boyfriend Came back from the War del duo olandese Jodi, ai lavori dello spagnolo Retroyou, al sensazionale 9/11 survivor, del Kinematic Collective, dedicato alle Twin Towers; videogame politicamente impegnati, da September 12th del collettivo Newsgaming, a STOP BUSH! degli attivisti di TWCDC (Together We Can Defeat Capitalism).
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA, 2004
...Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents an interactive multimedia exhibition that explores the history and influence of computer game culture and the extraordinary relationship between interactive computer games and contemporary art.
...Mauro Ceolin one of the leading international game artists, Ceolin depicts himself as a painter, even when he creates banners, animations or videogames such as GOOGLEBattle.03 (2004), a paintgame on Google's epic struggle against ali other search engines. Using a revisited painting technique, he creates vectorial images using an optical pen and a palette of fiat colors; the images can then be reproduced in various sizes and techniques, from acrylic painting to photographic printing.The subjects of this never-ending work are found images, fragments of the pop culture but, above ali, icons of the videogaming culture, from landscapes to cosplayers, from game designers to 8-bit musicians. His works have been on show in various exhibitions, among which the milestone event "Bang the Machine".
Trevi Flash Art Museum, Trevi, IT, 2004
...Mauro Ceolin presenta "SolidLandscapes", l’immagine di quanto rimane del campo di battaglia dei più sanguinari videogame una volta cancellata ogni traccia di violenza.
...Googlebattle, è l’ultimo dei suoi paintgame e rappresenta la battaglia in atto tra motori di ricerca e case produttrici di software contro il monopolio economico di Google.
Festival Maravee
Galleria Civica di Siracusa, IT, 2003
...Mauro Ceolin is a Milanese artist. In the last three years, he has been experimenting netart in his RGBproject. Structured like a work in progress, his project includes some acrylic paintings, a series of vectorial drawings and Flash animations. In Siracusa, Ceolin will exhibit RGBTetris, an artistic version of the famous Tetris videogame, and, in absolute preview, RGB Atari. In the first one, instead of the usual geometrical figures, the player must drive one into the other free falling brands of wellknown companies. The big Mc Donald's "M", Nike's "moustache" and many other famous logos compose a colorful and ironic mosaic, an eccentric Pop celebration of branding. RGB Atari uses the shape of more classic break-wall in order to describe the present situation of videogame industry overcoming movie industry.