Byblos Art Gallery opens its new space in the center of Verona. Inheriting the legacy of Swinger Art Gallery, Byblos will be directed by Dario Rinaldi, with Associate Director Masha Facchini. The gallery will exhibit internationally established and emerging contemporary artists, as well as experimental works. Byblos Art Gallery will create an extraordinary synergy with the Byblos brand and the new Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà, mainly designed by Alessandro Mendini. In line with Byblos’ dedication to supporting contemporary art and artists, the hotel lobby and suites all contain contemporary works and vanguard modern furniture. Byblos Art Gallery covers 600 mq on two levels: the ground floor exhibition space, with a bookshop /reading area and a bar; and the lower level exhibition and project space.

Byblos’ goal is to function as a laboratory for ideas and projects: the public is welcome to browse leisurely among artworks and books, and attend performances, conferences and panels. The gallery would like to serve as a cultural nexus, an active space for the exchange of ideas between artists, curators, collectors and the public interested in learning more about contemporary art.

Byblos Art Gallery will inaugurate its first season with 'Neo-Baroque!' an exhibition featuring some of the most prominent, internationally established and emerging artists in contemporary art today, who are based in New York.

Curated by Micaela Giovannotti & Joyce B. Korotkin, the exhibition focuses on the Neo-Baroque sensibility that has emerged and flowered rapidly since the dawn of the new millennium. After decades of Post-Modernism dominated by a primarily minimalist and conceptual aesthetic, the Neo-Baroque sensibility has infiltrated diverse artistic practices ranging from painting to sculpture, video, photography, performance and installation. A sensibility rather than a cohesive new style, Neo-Baroque embraces narrative, illustration, metaphor and symbolism.

Its elaborately embellished imagery is aggressively opulent and beautiful. Provocatively sensual and in love with excess, Neo-Baroque works are aglow with the decorative eye candy of rainbow colors and painterly surfaces such as those of Ann Craven; their curvaceous lines defy the Post-Modernist grid, as in the high-speed arabesques of Emilio Perez. Neobaroque is a visual and tactile feast that fills the sensory void created by some of the artistic practices of the latter quarter of the 20th century. This is exemplified by Angelo Filomeno’s prismatic taxidermied peacocks encrusted with iridescent peridots and crystals, and Fred Tomaselli’s labor-intensive, wildly patterned psychedelic collages comprised of pills, pictures and objects petrified within glossy resin, and Kehinde Wiley’s paintings with gilded and decorative backgrounds appropriated from art historical works into which are inserted the Black characters that history excluded. It is in such searingly difficult subject matter mirroring the darkest heart of contemporary life wedded to beauty that Neo-Baroque derives its power to evoke in the spectator an emotional whirlwind. Its elegiac toll can be felt in Robert Longo’s drawings of immense, erotic red roses, in Petah Coyne’s sculptures, silent wax odes to remembrance, and in the melancholic, enchanted forest through which life cycles in the animated video of Takagi Masakatsu & Saeko Takagi. Likewise, it appears in Alexis Rockman’s explorations of our damaged eco-systems and in Nicola Verlato’s inquiry into the dark underbelly of the contemporary psyche, both referencing the deep spatial illusions of classical Baroque painting as well as the virtual space of video games.

Neo-Baroque works are above all sensual and seductive, filling the senses as they solicit our reflection.

Participating Artists:

Petah Coyne

Ann Craven

Angelo Filomeno

Robert Longo

Emilio Perez

Alexis Rockman

Fred Tomaselli

Takagi Masakatsu & Saeko Takagi

Nicola Verlato

Kehinde Wiley

In conjunction with the exhibition, will be released the book 'NeoBaroque!', conceived and edited by Micaela Giovannotti & Joyce B. Korotkin and published by Charta. Besides the essay by the curators, the publication features prestigious critical contributions by Robert Storr, Shamim M. Momin and Marianne Boesky.