Federico Solmi Federico Solmi: Ship of Fools

The Brooklyn Rail Jun 06, 2024

Imagine you’re watching the cacophony of action-packed scenes rapidly and randomly bumped up against one another in the trailer for Federico Fellini’s already disorienting film Juliet of the Spirits and suddenly you find yourself actually in the film; it has become reality! That’s the best way I can describe the sensation of Federico Solmi’s exhibition Solmi - Ship Of Fools at the Venice Biennale (Palazzo Dona’ Dalle Rose, Fondamente Nova). I want to follow four threads in this profound body of work: the issue of political satire, the drive in and behind the pioneering formal innovation in these works, the urgency of narrative, and finally what this work means as a model of a life in art.

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