Alex Urso's Collages on Memling's Damned at Krakow Italian Institute

Eight works by Alex Urso (born 1987) are on display at the Italian Institute of Culture in Krakow, directed by Ugo Rufino. The Marche-based artist and curator presents a collage study on Hans Memling's triptych of the Last Judgment, housed at the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland. The dark installation aims to create an infernal atmosphere, as Urso focuses solely on the damned figures from the triptych. He offers them a new afterlife through cutouts of fleshy flowers and botanical fragments from German-language manuals, slightly folded to add volume. Urso, who resides in Warsaw, continues his practice of cannibalizing Renaissance painting, having previously incorporated Fra Angelico onto a mobile phone and Mantegna silhouettes into Joseph Cornell-style assemblages. His work functions as a citational meat grinder, granting an afterlife to art historical masterpieces.