Bevilacqua La Masa Fellows Show Opens with Selvatico-Giorgini Tribute

The Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice has opened its annual residency conclusion exhibition, this year prefaced by a documentary display honoring Riccardo Selvatico and Giovanni Battista Giorgini. Selvatico, a playwright and enlightened mayor of Venice, conceived the Venice Biennale; Giorgini promoted the first Italian Alta Moda presentation in Florence in 1951. Upstairs, fellows present works across media. Chiara Enzo's paintings investigate the body with technical skill and fragmented vision, balancing attraction and negation. Barbara De Vivi harmonizes iconographic references from different times and places, creating what Georges Didi-Huberman would call 'overdetermination' of the image. Jaspal Birdi starts from photographic images, then alters them with glitch aesthetics to challenge everyday certainties. Yiming He transforms ordinary moments—interactions with animals or plants—into dreamlike scenes. Francesco Pozzato's installations center on the myth of Psyche, using the past to understand the present intertwined with autobiography. Matteo Vettorello's 'living' sculptures measure viewers' emotional aspects, suspended between medical and poetic. Ruth Beraha uses formal austerity for reflections on history and memory, avoiding simplistic good-evil dichotomies; her phrase 'the adversary is an integral part of our identity' informs works like the self-portrait formalized in gold lettering 'Arbeit macht.'