Unrealism

Un-Realism was a group exhibition presented by SuperRare, one of the main marketplaces for crypto art, and held entirely in Spatial, a virtual space that visitors could explore in a browser or with a VR headset. Its announcement described the show as an attempt to bridge digital and physical realms, and it brought together Federico Clapis, Hackatao, Jonathan Wolfe, Stasienko, Skygolpe, Fabio Giampietro, Luna Ikuta, Sinclair, Jesse Draxler and Gary Cartlidge. Fabio Giampietro lists it among his exhibitions as an official SuperRare event that he co-curated and took part in.

The poster places Clapis' name at the top, over the image of a sculpted drone carrying a bundled newborn, standing on a plinth in an abandoned room with broken windows. The footage of the virtual show published by the artist moves through pale grey galleries marked with the SuperRare logo: in the foreground, a three-dimensional sculpture of a laptop from whose screen a female figure leans out with one arm outstretched, while framed digital images hang on the walls and the avatars of other visitors walk among the works.

For Clapis, who came to digital art from sculpture, the format was a natural one: in a metaverse gallery a sculpture can be shown as a volume that people walk around, without being reduced to a flat image. The show belongs to the season in which the first platforms of crypto art began building their own virtual venues, and it gathered several Italian artists who were among the most active on SuperRare at the time.

Sources

• Exhibitions - Fabio Giampietro — Fabio Giampietro
• stratto mostra spatial collettiva — Vimeo (Federico Clapis)