Artistic photography meets wine: the works of Zenato Academy on display in Bergamo

The Zenato Academy project has renewed the exhibition in Bergamo of the collective of twenty young artists from four prestigious International schools. Since 2018, the project has linked wine to fine art photography, promoted by one of the leading wineries in Valpolicella. The exhibition, titled, “Vino. Oltre: gli oggetti, il paesaggio, il ritratto e la fotografia” (Wine. Beyond: objects, landscape, portraits and photography), and curated by the art critic Luca Panaro, has put on display, for the first time, all the works created. The schools involved in the project each year are: the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan; F/16 in Berlin; FMAV - Scuola di Alta Formazione in Modena (Modena visual arts foundation), and SVA - School of Visual Arts in New York. The groups of students at these schools each worked on a different macro theme - objects, landscape, portrait, photography - and were invited to interpret the theme in an original manner, that is, to go “beyond” traditional iconography through the imaginative power of photography. The exhibition is part of the program, “ArtDate”, the Contemporary Art Festival being held during the appointment of Bergamo and Brescia Italian Capital of Culture 2023.
“Zenato Academy was founded in 2018”, Nadia Zenato, head of the family winery that she manages together with her brother, Alberto, said, “and our aim was to become an ideal place in which to support young artists and promote a new vision. That is to say, a free, disenchanted gaze proposing new images of our world, while continuing to pay close attention to the themes that animate the wine world. Beyond is the key word of our project, but it is also the key word of our vision; that is, seeing, acting, thinking, to overcome the limits, for our company, as well as our territory”. “Vino. Oltre” has been organized time by time into a one-week residency for five students selected from photography schools, accompanied by their tutor, and taking place at the Zenato wine company. The five images produced by each student were displayed in an exhibition, presented the following April at Vinitaly.
“Now, this exhibition allows us to see all the works of the students of the four schools involved, together for the first time”, the curator Luca Panaro explained, “from the beginning, we had envisaged this moment as the final act of the project that has allowed us to take a journey into the photographic images of new generations. The exhibition gives one the opportunity to appreciate the different stylistic approaches of the various training institutes, and above all, the creativity of the various Nationalities of students. The desire to go beyond traditional photographic representation is evident. Some students have chosen the technological call, riding the potential digital offers. Others, instead, used traditional equipment, interpreting the change within photography as something more subtle”.
In addition to the collective works of young photographers, there is another reason for art enthusiasts to visit Bergamo, which is, the “Infinito Presente” exhibition by Yayoi Kusama, one of the most famous Japanese artists in the world (open until March 24, 2024 at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo), and which Zenato has sponsored. “It is an honor for us to have been invited by The Blank to be part of this important project”, Nadia Zenato explained, “which brings one of the most well-known and appreciated contemporary art artists in the world to Italy, in collaboration with the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It is confirmation of confirms how much the value of our Country is perceived abroad and how much it is appreciated”.
Zenato Academy is the project of the winery Sergio Zenato founded in 1960. The wine production company has become a leader in Italy, and in 60 foreign countries, because it has been able to interpret, through the excellence of its wines, the soul of the territory of origin. The Zenato Academy is fully aware of the elective affinity between the story of wine and artistic language, and therefore promotes reflection on the themes and values that animate the wine world through photographic studies.