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Moco Museum Amsterdam

Physical and NFT works

Amsterdam, Netherlands

  • New Race by Federico Clapis, two concrete busts with screen-like slabs over their faces, in the Moco Museum garden facing the Rijksmuseum
  • Close-up of a New Race bust by Federico Clapis, its face hidden by a smooth slab, in the Moco Museum Amsterdam garden at sunset
  • Concrete bust with a rectangular slab covering the eyes, by Federico Clapis, in the garden of Moco Museum Amsterdam on Museumplein
  • Moco Museum Amsterdam label for Federico Clapis, presenting the NFT Flat Shyness and the concrete sculpture New Race side by side

Moco Museum Amsterdam is an independent museum of modern and contemporary art housed in Villa Alsberg, a townhouse on Museumplein next to the Van Gogh Museum and facing the Rijksmuseum. The museum presents Federico Clapis among its exhibiting artists, describing him as an Italian visual artist who moved from social media popularity to an art practice of installations, videos, sculptures and NFTs about the relationship between reality and technology.

In the museum's sculpture garden, Clapis' work was shown in two forms side by side. The physical piece was New Race, a pair of large concrete and iron busts, lent by the artist, in which a smooth rectangular slab like a phone screen covers the upper half of each face. The digital piece was Flat Shyness, a single-edition NFT lent by the private collector 33NFT and shown on a screen mounted on a stand in the gravel garden. The photographs show the two weathered busts on stone blocks and rusted steel bases, with the railings of the garden and the towers of the Rijksmuseum behind them at sunset. The museum's label asks visitors whether their phone has become an extension of their identity and links the sculpture to its NFT variation, ending on the image of people turning to stone as they stare into their screens.

The presentation shows a museum placing a physical sculpture and its digital counterpart next to each other, in the open air and at the edge of one of Amsterdam's main museum squares, an approach that reflects Clapis' move between sculpture and crypto art.

Sources

All exhibitions

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