Play – Art and Videogame

"PLAY. Videogames, Art and Beyond" was a large exhibition at the Reggia di Venaria, the Savoy royal palace of La Venaria Reale outside Turin, set in the palace's Sale delle Arti. Curated by Guido Curto, director of the consortium of the Savoy royal residences, and the game designer Fabio Viola, founder of the TuoMuseo collective, it treated the video game as a tenth art form across twelve themed rooms, from homages to the pioneers of the medium to reconstructed gaming environments and unseen digital drawings by Andy Warhol.

Federico Clapis appeared in Play_Art, the fourth room, devoted to the meeting point of still, moving and interactive images, alongside Bill Viola, Banksy, Invader, Cao Fei, Jago, Tabor Robak and the AES+F collective. His NFT was presented on a wall-mounted screen in a bright room with tall windows onto the palace courtyard. The image, the same one he issued as the edition Digital Growth – Flooded, shows a giant graffiti-covered capsule, shaped like a toy surprise egg, broken open to reveal a baby, set among debris on the water with factory chimneys fading into the haze. Fortune Italia singled out the work as an example of how digital artists can reach the public directly.

The show brought crypto art into the rooms of a baroque residence and into a dialogue with video game culture. For Clapis, whose work keeps returning to childhood, growth and technology, it set his digital imagery beside internationally known names in a public museum context in Piedmont.

Sources

• A major exhibition at the Reggia di Venaria dedicated to video games as a tenth art form — Finestre sull'Arte
• Play, alla Reggia di Venaria il videogioco diventa arte — Fortune Italia