Biography

Astolfo Funes was born in 1973 in Maracay in Venezuela, has lived and worked since 2011 in Miami, US

Funes’s painting represents femininity and his artistic influences come from literature and artists such as Willem De Kooning, Oswaldo Vigas, but also from post-war German art for strength and dynamism. Present in many auction houses, his works are in private and public collections including: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Maracay, Venezuela; Solar East Hampton, New York; American Art Promotion, Paris; Nelson Sanchez Chapellin Foundation.

Funes’s productions are purely pictorial works (the artist has also created large-sized installations on PVC), with medium and large-sized properties dating back to the most interesting part of his artistic career from 2008 to today. Tableau with strong and warm colors in which the white color is the protagonist. Funes’ conceptual research is linked to femininity but not only to her: attention to the gesture, the mood, the occasion, become the leitmotif of her personal interpretation of beauty, pleasure and sin, between reality and artifice. The artist makes us recite the cliché of femininity, built on the criteria of glamor and fashion with a personal expressive language, directly addressing the central themes of contemporary culture, identity, variety, body and sexuality, mixing glamor to the history of painting, staging the rite of the human being.

The pictorial intervention sometimes with a spatula, sometimes imprinted with the hands, becomes the stage for a drama without event, the almost sculptural plasticity of the engraved bodies plays and alternates with the void that surrounds them, in a game of full and empty, of body and soul, of apparently static and unstoppable physicality. Funes paints what he sees, concentrates on multiple levels of reality, with the intent of exposing truth and artifice and escaping everyday life, as in a mirror, real and imaginary, claustrophobic parties and anxieties. The temporality, the spatiality, the worldliness, are elements around which the human being builds his own self. These are stages that are followed in self-knowledge, an often unusual journey without a precise destination, which goes beyond rational logic and tries to modify the concepts or concepts of freedom, identity, health, disease, madness.

He has exhibited internationally and with Primo Piano in several solo shows in Italy and the Middle East. The works exhibited here are part of some personal exhibitions dedicated to the artist and published in the catalog.

Among the latest solo exhibitions:

• 2019 – L’art Dans La Vitrine – De Passage. By Association Artycult, Saint-Denis-Paris, France
• 2015 – Astolfo Funes – Sketches. The Artisan Lounge, Miami, Florida
• 2011 – Katty. Artdealermiami, Miami Beach, USA.

Among the recent group shows:

• 2020 – Borderline. Curated by Pia Cruzalegui and Felix Suazo, ID Art Lab, Miami, US
• 2017 – Art Olympic Biennal. Curated by Bartus Bartolomes, Atlanta City, US
• 2015 – Italian Art Fair. Primo Piano LivinGallery & DUCMAC Mall of Emirates, Dubai, UAE
• 2015- Venezuelan Art Exhibition. Latin Art Gallery, Prague, Czech Rep

Complete CV on request

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