Now living in Berlin and Brooklyn, Andrea Ventura first became known to the public in the USA primarily as a brilliant illustrator. His portraits of artists for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone are highly acclaimed, and in 2010 he was awarded a gold medal at the Lead Awards. But Andrea Ventura is never just an illustrator; he also develops in parallel as a freelance painter whose work is influenced by the art of the early Expressionists. His paintings are characterized by strong drop shadows, and his keen sense of composition often makes the scenes appear almost photographic. Andrea Ventura’s subjects are classic themes from art history—interiors, portraits, nudes, architectural views, monuments—and at the same time reveal the painter’s fascination with everyday life. He places his figures, often belonging to a bygone era, in quiet, deserted rooms which, bathed in a cool and delicate light, evoke a feeling of loneliness and longing for something lost.
Paolo Ventura lives and works in New York. His works are represented in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Library of Congress in Washington, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, among others, and were exhibited in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2010. The artist plays with ambiguity and mystery in his oeuvre; his images are a mixture of memories, fantasy, and visions, and are always part of a longer scenic story. For his photographs, he creates dioramas, small three-dimensional miniature models, which he fills with figures and props and then photographs. Paolo Ventura experiments with light, perspective, and details until the desired atmosphere—a mixture of reality and fiction—is created: “I use photography because people believe that what they see in photos is real—even if they know it’s a model.”
With the double exhibition Andrea & Paolo Ventura – Dreams, DIE GALERIE presents the first joint exhibition of works by the Italian artist brothers.
Born in Milan in 1968 as twins, their childhood was marked by the aftermath of the war and post-war period, by their grandmother’s stories, and by military relics found beneath the surface of the idyllic Italian landscape. Both brothers are captivated by the past of their homeland and create their own fantasy world in their minds, which continues to influence their art to this day. One particular thing they have in common is their fascination with costumes, as only these, according to Paolo Ventura, are capable of “defining a person in terms of rank, equipment, time, geography, or ethnicity.”
Paolo Ventura studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan from 1989 to 1991 and soon found his preferred medium in photography, while Andrea made a name for himself as an illustrator and classical painter. In 1991, the brothers set up a studio in New York. Their works are represented in major international collections, and their solo and group exhibitions have been shown in Europe, Asia, and the US.
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