Giacomo Spazio

Biography

If Giacomo Spazio’s works were sounds, they would be harsh noise at the loudest volume: a gallery of “mean” pop images, with shocking, fluorescent colors that shout out their presence, as loud as possible, precisely. The reasons are many, but for Giacomo Spazio, who has experience in graphics, performance, and music, the cut&mix&paste is a practice intrinsic to his way of being. Similar to the disk-jockey practice, which consists of mixing different samples to a track, modifying them, selecting and associating pieces in a “never heard or seen before” succession, Spazio uses variations of that same process to make his art.

Giacomo Spazio is an Italy born, Italy based artist. In 1975, he started writing poetical phrases on the walls of Milan. At that time, he was one of the first Italian artists to make the streets his go-to canvas (1975-1987), making himself a lead in the Italian Street Art movement. He then went on to perform music between Milan and London, both alone and with a group called “Poesia Metropolitana”. In the mid-1980s he got involved with the punk and indie-rock culture and even founded the punk(art)rock band called 2+2=5 in 1982, with whom he recorded 3 records; he also took part in several other bands before finally going solo. From 1990 on, his art career, swinging between music and literature, began to make a strong emotional and social impact. “I am a man. Simply a man. My life style totally reflects my artistic work. We all need poetry and we all need to get rid of any slavery!”, Spazio. It was not until the late 90s that he went back to being a visual artist.

Nowadays, Giacomo lives in Milan, Italy. Still working on his art, Spazio belongs to a collective of artists in which he founded: the “Limited No Art Gallery” – an independent art gallery launched in 2006 to promote art, without prejudice.


The iconography is borrowed from fanzines of the 1970s and 1980s, from punk graphics and the album covers of those years, from documents of the underground scene and artistic-musical performances, from photos taken from publications, magazines, and daily newspapers. The mind immediately races to the silk screens of Andy Warhol and Pop Art, but it is only a superficial evocation because Spazio goes well beyond, making his own the practice of incursion and theft typical of the punk who uses information and images from the media and propose them with an ironic and desecrating, cynical and subversive intention. The DIY (Do It Yourself) attitude and the lo-fi style of the photocopy are elevated to the status of the artwork in these recent creations that seem like enlargements of fanzine and album covers and are, in a certain way, familiar to those who have crossed or shared the musical, cinema to graphic, and literary course and imaginary of underground cultures.

Spazio works by dislocation and shifting, creating fakes that acquire political value: by manipulating images, the artist carries out a critique on information, on the mechanism that presides over the “creation” of news, denouncing its presumed truthfulness.

Spazio’s works are silk screens, and as such, made in series and can potentially be reproduced ad infinitum: however, they are never identical, but instead are characterized as different repetitions, variable for their iconographic details and colors. And it is the color that is the most experimental aspect.

Selected Exhibitions
2011 Contemporary Istanbul – Istanbul – Turkey
2011 Dissidents – West Berlin Gallery – Berlin – Germany
2011 Blooom/Art.Fair – Cologne – Germany
2011 Stroke#5 – Berlin – Germany
2011 Stroke#4 – Munich – Germany
2011 Pop Life! – The Don Gallery – Milan – Italy
2011 Beyond Good & Evil – West Berlin Gallery – Berlin – Germany
2010 Innestare – Officina Temporanea – Milan- Italy
2010 Stroke#3 – Berlin – Germany
2010 Stroke#2 – Munich – Germany
2010 As Loud As Possible – Xlab Gallery – Berlin – Germany
2009 Pop Disaster – LimitedNoArtGallery – Milan – Italy
2009 Museum of Contemporary Art – Istanbul – Turkey
2009 Stroke 1 – Art Fair – Munich – Germany
2009 Derbylius – Artist Book Show – Milan – Italy
2008 Art Fair – Geneva – Switzerland
2008 Pop Disaster Bergamo – Orange Gallery – Bergamo – Italy
2007 Never Forget – Container Art – Geneva – Switzerland
2006 Do it Again – Container Art – Varese – Italy
2006 A New Loop – MOMA -Museum of Contemporary Art – Tokyo – Japan
2006 Selected Ambient Words – Galleria Comunale – Riccione – Italy
2005 Selected Ambient Words – Galleria Santa croce – Cattolica – Italy
2005 Selected Ambient Words – Galleria Libreria Derbyliu – Milan – Italy
2005 Box 43 – Container Art – Bergamo – Italy