| Subtitle: | 21 artists for the 21st century |
| Year: | 2010 |
What is the common denominator of art and industry? Are there any shared values, questions, mechanisms, or languages that allow these two seemingly very distant major actors of today's world to talk to each other?
Contemporary art as a language is always striving towards change, always searching for new forms of expression, and therefore is a bit out of time, either too far ahead of its time or too far behind it. Yet it is precisely this special position in time that makes it a visionary means of expression, which gives us unconventional images of reality and unexpected, sometimes incomprehensible, reading keys that nonetheless have the power to anticipate what will come. The same creative tension also permeates industrial culture, the spirit of entrepreneurship, the audacity to explore and produce new things.
A project developed as part of Confindustria's 100 year celebrations, the exhibition 21x21. 21 Artists for 21st Century, promoted by Confindustria and by the Unione Industriale di Torino, curated by Francesco Bonami and produced by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, reviews the most innovative trends and most experimental languages expressed by the young Italian art scene through existing works and new projects.
With critical contributions by Francesco Bonami, Nicholas Serota, Udo Kittelman, Daniel Birnbaum, Severino Salvemini, Mario Calabresi and Ilaria Bonacossa, the catalogue illustrates the work of the artists as well as a special parallel project to 21x21 created by Alberto Garutti.