Bussate e vi sarà aperto

Gian Marco Montesano is an artist, a writer and a theater director.
In the 1960s he moved to Bologna, and painted the images with which he grew up, those of religious art, conveyed by prayer cards for the popular worship of saints, but shifted from their traditional context to take on new meanings, in an approach it would be simplistic to define as “post-modern.”
Later he went to live Paris, where he was involved in the lively scene of the time, forming intense friendships with the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard.
From the end of the 1980s throughout the 1990s, Montesano was credited as a sort of founder of so-called Medialismo, a term he took with many reservations, and even rejected, because his attitude is not simply metalinguistic, by aims at the recreation of a “realism” that is utterly mental, that reflects on the enigmatic meanings of History, almost always by painting in black and white.
The (necessarily photographic) repertoire of historical memory utilized by Montesano is our collective imaginary, dating back most of all to the dramatic and crucial years of the formation of Europe over the course of the 20th century, until the moment of its crisis. In this panorama of being we find all the heterogeneous personalities coming to grips with the unfolding of time: children and women, soldiers and battle scenes, romantic landscapes, celebrities and urban views with a cinematic, post-realist quality.
Besides painting, Montesano has a career in theater, as a director and founder of a company known for its experimental and innovative approach. He was invited to take part in the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 2009. In 2003 and 2005 his works were shown in the Prague Biennial. Montesano has had solo exhibitions in important public and private spaces, in Italy and abroad. Many critics and philosophers have written about his work, including Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Sollers, Jean Baudrillard, Toni Negri, Achille Bonito Oliva.

He lives and works in Paris and Bologna.