Looking back at Arte Fiera’s 50th anniversary – My favourite top 5 contemporary galleries

This year marks the 50th anniversary of ArteFiera Bologna: it all began back in 1974, when BolognaFiere decided to create a small modern and contemporary art section within what was then called the Trade Fair. It was an immediate success: the first edition counted only ten galleries; a year later, there were 200.
1974-2024 is an anniversary that no other Italian art fair has yet reached and that few fairs in foreign countries have exceeded. (Image above Giuseppe Lo Schiavo, 2023, courtesy Spazio Nuovo)
Arte Fiera is celebrating this amazing accomplishment by focusing on its origins: the first, pioneering editions that in just a few years made it developed into an international event. This year’s programme reflects on the events, personalities, works, and publications from those years, starting from the fair’s foundation in 1974. It also celebrates the ‘70s in Bologna, an incredible decade when the city was a trailblazer in visual arts, architecture, and in conceiving new forms of relations among art, politics, and society.
This edition’s Artistic Director is once again Simone Menegoi as well as Enea Righi, renowned manager and collector, is Managing Director for the second time in a row.
Arte Fiera 2024 brings together 196 exhibitors, mainly Italian, athough a few international galleries are showcasing in Bologna, such as Richard Saltoun, Sprovieri, Michaela Stock and Repetto.

The Main Section, divided as always into post-war and contemporary art, is accompanied by three curated, invitation-only sections: Photography and moving images, Pittura XXI, and Multiples, presenting works published in edition, ranging from artist books to design.
Pittura XXI is curated once more by Davide Ferri, critic and independent curator, while Photography and moving images is entrusted for the second time to Giangavino Pazzola, curator of di Camera – Centro italiano per la fotografia (Turin). Multiples welcomes a new curator: critic and art historian Alberto Salvadori.
In addition to the curated sections, the Percorso trail is again presented: this is not really a section, but, as the name implies, an itinerary that thematically links some of the stands in the Main Section. This year, Percorso’s theme is Design, a universal language that unites artists of different generations and styles. For the 2024 edition, Percorso is supported by an exceptional partner: Ducati.

Here there is my personal choice of the 5 best galleries in the contemporary section:

N5 Wizard Gallery, Milan. “Waves are the language of the sea. A language that can be used for painting, for creating images of a more fluid world, a world without rigidity a liquid world.” This is the artistic statement by Django Hernandez, one of the major artists represented by the gallery and featuring at the Fair (some of his works are pictured in the booth view above). Wizard Gallery represents more than 30 innovative international contemporary artists, including Django Hernandez whose wavy prints, sculptures and oil paintings remind of the sea endless undulation and create a fragmented vision of reality filtered thorough the fluidity of a watery atmosphere.

N4 Boccanera Gallery, Trento and Milan. The gallery presents a solo show by painter Linda Carrara within the curated section Pittura XXI. Focusing on her recent practice and works, the presentation focuses on Linda Carrara’s pictorial vision shift from a purely figurative towards a “vitalist” representation of reality or “figural pictorial event”. The images presented by the artist do not coincide with the things they describe, rather they are intended to evoke the primary experience that generated them, so to create a metaphysical narration of both the pictorial event and the experience from which they arose.

N3 Mazzoli Gallery Thanks to the support of TRUST per l’Arte Contemporanea, the photographic collage Photomatic d’Italia, 1973-74 by Franco Vaccari (Modena, 1936) represented by Galleria Mazzoli has been selected to become part of the collection of MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Another work to be included in the collection is Senza Titolo #15, 2023 by Chiara Camoni Piacenza, 1974, represented by SpazioA. Mazzoli Gallery showcases a group of established artists incuding Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia and Peter Halley together with more emerging talents such as Cuban artist Ariel Cabrera Montejo, whose large oil paintings show a fresh and very personal technique, blending sarcasm, erotic-burlesque and ludic elements. In his series Wet Campaign the artist creates an uncanny reality where fluctuating figures swim like fishes in a fairy-tale fish tank.

N2 Primo Marella Gallery, Milano Founded in 1992, Primo Marella Gallery has committed to the promotion and documentation of emerging artists and movements from different areas outside Europe,
Starting with China in the late Nineties, the focus of the gallery’s programs has touched different emerging areas, from Russia to India and from South East Asia to, more recently, Africa, always with the precise goal to pioneer in the presentation of such complex and constantly evolving artistic scenes and to gain the attention of museums, institutions and collectors. Two among their represented artists will feature at the forthcoming 60th Venice Biennale from April 20 to November 24, 2024: Hako Hankson will represent Cameroon national pavilion, while Troy Makaza, is part of the six artists selected to represent Zimbabwe, alongside Gillian Rosselli, Sekai Machache, Victor Nyakauru, Moffat Takadiwa and Kombo Chapfika.

N1 Osart Gallery The Milan based art gallery showcases a large and flamboyant group display of works by contemporary African artists from South-Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. The exhibited artworks include the large paintings by Feni Chulumanco, Jeanne Gaigher, Franklyn Dzingai, Sethembile Msezane, Katharien de Villiers, Wilfred Timire e Ikeorah Chisom Chi-FADA. Wilfred Tamire focuses his artistic research on an in-depth analysis of his life context in Zimbabwe, which he reflects on through his assemblages of found objects, such as the packaging material that he sews together in tapestries. The use of recycling has made him one of the most original representatives of Zimbabwe’s artistic research in recent times. Another remarkable artist from the gallery is Feni Chulumanco, whose large paintings encase human figures in glass boxes, contextualizing the idea of individualism. Inspired by his own individual journey and personal growth, Chulumanco takes the viewer on a rich visual journey allowing one to focus on our own identity, self-worth, and sense of fulfilment.

A final remark on the Public program:
As part of the Opus Novum initiative Fiera 2024 reveals a new commission assigned to artist Alberto Garutti: a plaque permanently sitting at the main entrance of the Fair District bearing the inscription, in Italian and in English, “All the steps I have taken in my life have brought me here, now.” It is a poetic invitation to everyone who walks by to consider the interweaving of conscious and unconscious decisions, intent and coincidence, that defined their path in space and time. Bologna thus becomes one of the cities (about twelve throughout the world, including Florence, Antwerp, Kaunas (Lthuania), and Tokyo) to have versions of the work, each differing in language, material, and size. In this way, Arte Fiera completes its homage to one of the most important Italian artists of the past 50 years, who passed away just a few months ago.