The body as a language of the unconscious sexuality as a distorted mirror of existence. In this exhibition Knoten and Germondari explore inner territories through radically different yet equally revealing approaches. Knoten pushes the representation of the body toward excess and the uncanny with a grotesque visionary style that challenges taboos and conventions turning desire and fear into raw visual matter. Germondari by contrast sharpens conceptual language with surgical irony: his gaze is lucid disarming capable of deconstructing erotic codes until their absurdity is laid bare. Despite their opposing tools both artists lead us back to the most fragile and enigmatic core of identity—where the body is no longer just a surface but a map of inner transformation.
Period: 20 September - 4 October 2025 (Giornata del Contemporaneo 2025 / Contemporary Art Day 2025)
Opening time: the days after the inauguration by appointment only writing to wgermondari@mac.com
Michael Knoten (Cheb Czech Republic 1984) is a Czech visual artist and photographer who works outside of official institutions and the academic scene. He grew up and still lives in Franzensbad in the Czech Republic. His artistic production moves on the border between the mystical the grotesque and a gloomy meditation on human existence. Knoten's works are intimate testimonies of beauty and ruin of the body as a mirror of inner states of faith and doubt of desire and pain. Create for inner necessity - in a raw way without compromise outside of fashions and artistic collectives. Every image every photograph is a fragment of his personal mythology. “I create out of necessity and inner conflict. For repulsion towards empty aestheticism and for the need to talk about what hurts. My work is a confession a cry a heresy - it explores the places where society does not look or that it covers with a patina of banality. At the center of my interest is not the body but the soul - corrupt wounded contaminated by guilt and betrayal. I am interested in fate the fall the sweet intoxication of sin and what remains after the collapse of faith. Visually I draw on religious iconography occult symbols dark mirrors of the Baroque the potential of the Renaissance the pride of antiquity and the now lost pagan rituals. Mercy in my work turns into indifference extasy into spasm faith into obsession. Everything is questioned. And it is precisely in this decomposition that I look for beauty - or rather what remains of it: a relic a shadow. My art doesn't console it questions. My work is not meant to be decoration but a mirror of the heresy we carry within us. I'm not an academic nor a theorist – I'm a witness. And what I create is testimony of the man who has lost innocence but who perhaps for this very reason has found the truth”. (Michael Knoten) www.deviantart.com/michaelknoten/gallery
Werther Germondari (Rimini 1963) Visual artist performer and filmmaker lives and works in Rome and Amelia in Umbria. Attentive to innovative neo-conceptual experimental dynamics that are characterized by an ironic and surreal taste he has been conducting research through numerous expressive media since the early eighties. He participated in exhibitions in private galleries and experimental spaces alternating ambient installations video work and performative acts focusing attention on hidden elements related to a real social and political vision characterized by a strongly ironic and surreal style. Werther graduated in 1988 with a scholarship at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. He then obtained his DAMS degree in Theater Directing Institutions at the University of Bologna. As an independent filmmaker he often collaborated with Maria Laura Spagnoli his life partner making numerous short films. Short films that have been screened at numerous festivals (including Cannes in 1994 and Venice in 1996) and distributed in European cinemas and on numerous international television stations. In 1998 he created the project "Tractatus logico-phileroticus" a work in progress to make films on the relationship of the human species with its sexual desire through a philosophical ironic grotesque and playful approach. At the moment the finished feature films are Sex Equo (2011) Sex Novo (2021) and (S)explicitus (2022) while new episodes have already been made for Sex Novo II and (S)explicitus II and (S)explicitus III. http://www.werthergermondari.com/
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