The exhibition will countinue untile May 28th, 2022.
Curated by Giuseppe Pizzuto
Critical text by Giuseppe Pizzuto
Hogre. Anthological Exhibition 2007/2022 was born with an encyclopedic intent but above all from the purpose of highlighting the aesthetic research of Hogre, a provocative visual artist always ready for new challenges, specializing in unauthorized interventions in public space, marked by irony and subversion. The artist made his debut in Rome in 2006 by covering Berlusconi’s election billboards in the Tufello neighborhood with insults and red noses. With graffiti and stencils he has painted the walls of various cities in Italy and Europe, and in 2011 he opened his first solo exhibition in Rome, which will be followed by several other solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
His solo show at Wunderkammern hosts a wide variety of works covering all of Hogre’s production from 2007 to 2022, years in which he worked in numerous Italian and European cities such as Rome, Turin, Milan, Warsaw and London. On display along with the tools of the trade, including stencils and the wooden board needed to make them, we find the artist’s best-known works as well as the most discussed. One example is Alias kiss of the Aqueducts, a reproduction on canvas of a stencil the artist used in 2020 on a plugging of a 2nd-century AD Roman cistern at the Aqueducts Park in Rome. With the creation of this work, Hogre has made, as Claudio Gnessi, president of the Casilino Ecomuseum, commented, “an authentically illegal gesture, riaffming the anti-authoritarian, rebellious and illegal nature of so-called Street Art.”
Also on display in the exhibition is an oil on canvas painting entitled Ruinair (semiotic subversion of the Ryanair brand), in which the travel company promotes tourist routes to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a plastic island in the Pacific Ocean larger than the entire French soil. Also of relevance are three works entitled Filter Bubble 1, 2 and 3, inspired by the streams of social network images that dominate our visual perception today. The exhibition thus documents most of the themes and techniques used by Hogre: stencils, but also oil painting, acrylic painting, digital painting, 3D modeling and screen printing.
Accompanying the itinerary is the presentation of an artist’s book created thanks to Wunderkammern and Interno Notte. Two hundred copies with hand-painted covers, two hundred and forty pages in which pencil sketches, graphics and photos of interventions in public space follow one another in an experimental layout. An ongoing research that the artist explains as follows, “Hogre is the pseudonym under which I have been signing interventions of creative vandalism and sabotage of mass communication since 2007. The name comes from a humanoid monster from an early 2000s video game. Monstrum has the same root as monere in Latin, meaning to show, but also to reveal and admonish. In 2007 Hogre is the artificial monster with which I admonish myself, reversing and twisting my condition as a suburban high schooler programmed for resignation. The themes I address are argued with the only perspective I recognize in art, namely that of anarcho-individualism; far from proclaiming the abolition of all rules as is often mistakenly believed, anarchism is that philosophical-political current centered on radical critique of power starting with self-awareness and self-discipline. For this reason, stylistic research and study have always been central to my path as a self-taught artist.”
Media Partner: Arsity, Artuu, Collater.al, FACE Magazine
Partner Tecnici: Abbazia di Busco, Eurograph, Interno Notte