London-based Italian artist Quayola (b.1982) creates hybrid spaces of animated painting, sculpture and architecture. He is highly regarded for his enigmatic and entrancing digital video creations that challenge preconceptions about art, architecture, and the concepts according to which sound, movement, composition and colour can two-dimensionally interact.
The artist engages a practice of audio-visual performance, drawing, photography and software programming through which he explores old master paintings and themes, baroque and gothic architecture, neo classical sculpture and the connection between geometry, symmetry, sound and colour. In his videos, the boundary between the real and artificial is broken down: fresco-covered ceilings of the Vatican splinter and seem to bubble without ever losing their geometric composition; colour breathes, cathedral glass dances.
It certainly is sheer beauty and harmony that Quayola’s works resonate. However, simultaneously, it is apparent that we witness a precise mathematical analysis of structures, textures and light that constitute the image which has suddenly become canvas: the gaze becomes the point of logic where a picture unfolds, as if the life of a work were retrieved from underneath its appearance.
Quayola has benefited from exceptional access to some of the world’s most reticent institutions due to commissions: he has filmed inside the Vatican and worked on site in some of Europe’s most famous art institutions and churches, including Notre Dame, Paris, and the Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille. He was awarded the prestigious Golden Nica award at the Prix Ars Electronica 2013 for his work Forms with artist Memo Akten.
The first solo exhibition of Quayola’s work opened at bitforms gallery, New York, in 2012 and travelled to Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles. In addition, Quayola has been included in group exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The British Film Institute, London; the Church of Saint Eustache, Paris; Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires; Park Avenue Armory, New York; as well as at festivals including Sonar, Barcelona, and Elektra, Montreal. The artist frequently collaborates with musicians and has worked with Mira Calix, Paid, Matthias Kispert and the National Orchestra of Bordeaux.
Quayola lives and works in London.
