Umberto Giangrandi, Italian-born artist, activist, and teacher, has spent half a century documenting social realities in Colombia, his home since 1966, and pioneering multimedia representations of the body. In Bodegón Erótico (1989), Giangrandi reworks and paints over an earlier print. In the monochromatic fruit in the foreground and in the irregular hatching of the framing wall, Giangrandi exposes the printed paper ground of the work, echoing the multimedia collages he produced for the radical Taller 4 Rojo (1972–1976). Painting over a bowl of fruit that originally sat to the right of the glass bottle, Giangrandi makes space in the composition for a couple embracing in the verdant landscape that stretches behind the interior. Referencing his earlier series of sexually explicit nocturnes, Giangrandi juxtaposes the unambiguous representation of sex in an open, public space with a suggestive still life. The encoded symbolism in this arrangement of halved fruit and long- necked decanter points to a repression of desire to which Giangrandi responds with a scene of uninhibited freedom.
This is the first time the work of Umberto Giangrandi is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Lucia Neirotti
