Past and present, history and myth, reality and spectacle are conflated and distorted in Federico Solmi’s The Great Farce (2017), a monumental media work in the collection of Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art, on view this fall.
The museum will mount its first full presentation of Solmi’s installation with the exhibition Federico Solmi: The Great Farce (September 19 – December 1, 2024). The immersive 8-minute installation consists of nine video projections spanning the entirety of The Block Museum’s largest gallery. In the multiscreen presentation, the handmade and the high-tech are deftly blended together. Drawings and paintings serve as the foundation of a visual universe enlivened using a variety of technologies, including 3D animation, motion capture, and video game engine software, to create a surreal take on American history.
“Federico Solmi’s The Great Farce is one of a group of exhibitions on view this Fall largely drawn from The Block’s collection, that are timed to coincide with the 2024 elections, encouraging us to think about the history of the United States and its future,” says Lisa Corrin, the Block’s Ellen Philip Katz Executive Director.
“Art has the power to catalyze rich dialogue and productive debate, to challenge assumptions, and to expand our understanding of the world and our place within it. The Great Farce provokes consideration of the narratives of national history and national identity that we inherit and perpetuate. The aesthetic and content choices made by an artist often result in powerful and disruptive experiences. We invite you to join us in considering your experience of Federico Solmi’s The Great Farce and the critical questions it raises.”
“Art has the power to catalyze rich dialogue and productive debate, to challenge assumptions, and to expand our understanding of the world and our place within it. The Great Farce provokes consideration of the narratives of national history and national identity that we inherit and perpetuate.”
Lisa Corrin, Ellen Philips Katz Executive Director
A Frenzied American Story
Featuring a cast of time-traveling world leaders with a feverish madness for power, Solmi’s animation turns a frenzied, fun-house mirror to grandstanding historical figures.
Solmi’s research for the work began with the question, “What is history?” The Great Farce specifically questions underlying premises that have shaped narratives about the founding of the United States, ones that Solmi inherited growing up in Italy and which he encountered again when he emigrated to this country.
On the artwork’s surreal narrative, Federico Solmi notes, “Reality has become an eternal amusement theme park. It has become a place where the world’s leaders can rewrite, fabricate, or travel to any event of the past, present, or future. They entertain, distract, and misdirect the world’s population through spectacle. Epic battles, great adventures, and lavish ceremonies are staged as re-enactments of historical events… The resulting chaos dissolves any distinction between truth and myth, immortalizing the leaders and elevating them as Gods to a faux Mount Olympus. From its heavenly terrace, they look out to admire their counterfeit universe.”
“Reality has become an eternal amusement theme park. It has become a place where the world’s leaders can rewrite, fabricate, or travel to any event of the past, present, or future. They entertain, distract, and misdirect the world’s population through spectacle.”
Federico Solmi on The Great Farce
The artist’s work often utilizes bright, brash colors and a satirical aesthetic to portray a dystopian vision of our present-day society. His exhibitions regularly feature a variety of media, including virtual reality experiences, video installations, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Solmi uses his art as a vehicle to stimulate a robust conversation with his audience, highlighting the contradictions and fallibilities that characterize our time.
Technology and Texture
2017’s The Great Farce is the result of Solmi’s elaborate artistic process that combines traditional drawing and painting with gaming and digital technology. 3-D models of characters and environments are built and texture-mapped with scans of hand-painted imagery. A virtual world is created within a game engine, where each scene is staged as a movie set. The characters act as puppets, animated through motion capture and computer scripts rather than strings. Scenes are recorded by an in-game camera from a first-person view, giving the perspective of a director or voyeur.
“Digital technology has no empathy,” the artist told the magazine Brooklyn Rail in 2024, “and you have to add that with hand drawing.”
[Watch: The Making of The Great Farce]
“The Great Farce is one of Solmi’s most ambitious works in terms of technical complexity, physical scale, and scope of content,” says exhibition curator Janet Dees, Steven, and Lisa Munster Tananbaum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Throughout his practice, Solmi uses satire, farce, and grotesque representations to question the complex relationships between nationalism, colonialism, and consumerism. We hope The Great Farce will open space for campus-wide discussion around many topics, including the use of satire as a form of social critique and how popular culture can be a vehicle for reinforcing stereotypical and mythologized narratives of American history.”
“Throughout his practice, Solmi uses satire, farce, and grotesque representations to question the complex relationships between nationalism, colonialism, and consumerism”
Janet Dees, Steven, and Lisa Munster Tananbaum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
The Great Farce was originally commissioned for the 2017 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt, Germany, and presented on the façade of the city’s Schauspiel Opera Theater in Frankfurt, Germany. The work was later adapted into a gallery installation for Open Spaces Kansas City (2018). American Circus, a work adapted from The Great Farce, was displayed across multiple electronic billboards in New York’s Times Square in July 2019 as a project of Times Square Arts.
The Block Museum of Art received the nine-channel, limited-edition work as a gift from the artist’s studio in recognition of the museum’s 40th anniversary in 2020 and its related initiative, Thinking about History. The work can be presented as an immersive gallery installation with nine projections or a sculptural “portable theater” with embedded video that represents the content, spirit, and aesthetic of the larger installation.
About the Artist
Federico Solmi was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1973. Since 1999, he has lived and worked in New York. Most recently, his work was the subject of a major exhibition, Federico Solmi: Ship Of Fools, at the Venice Biennale (Palazzo Dona’ Dalle Rose) [Read More]
In 2009, Solmi was awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation of New York with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in the category of Video & Audio. Solmi’s work was included in the 100-year anniversary exhibition of The Phillips Collection, Seeing Differently, and in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s traveling exhibition, Outwin 2019: ‘American Portraiture Today,’ as well as the inaugural exhibition of the Ocean Flower Museum Island in Hainan Province, Danzhou, China.
Past solo museum surveys include ‘Joie de Vivre’ (September 2022 – February 2023) at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, ‘The Grand Masquerade’ (2019) at the Tarble Art Center in Charleston, Illinois, and ‘American Circus’ (2016) at the Haifa Museum of Art in Israel.
His work has been included in several international Biennials, including Open Spaces: A Kansas City Arts Experience (2018), the Beijing Media Art Biennale (2016), Frankfurt B3 Biennial of the Moving Image (2017- 2015), the First Shenzhen Animation Biennial in China (2013) the 54th Venice Biennial (2011) and the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in New Mexico (2010.)
From 2016 to 2019, Federico Solmi was a visiting Professor at Yale University School of Art, and Yale School of Drama, New Haven CT. Solmi was appointed guest critic at the Yale University School of Art for 2022.
Exhibition Details:
Dates: September 19, 2024 – December 1, 2024
Location: The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
Address: 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL 60208
Museum Hours: Wed-Friday 12P –8PM, Sat & Sun 12PM–5PM Closed Mon & Tues
Admission: Free and open to the public
Keynote Event: Federico Solmi: Artist Talk – Wednesday, October 23, 6PM (FREE and open to all)
Press Contact: Lindsay Bosch, Associate Director, Marketing & Communications, The Block Museum of Art, Lindsay.bosch@northwestern.edu / 773-633-9467
About The Block Museum of Art:
Free and open to all, The Block is Northwestern University’s art museum. The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University is an engine that drives questioning, experimentation, and collaboration across fields of study, with visual arts at the center. We do this by activating art’s power as a form of insight, research, and knowledge creation that makes human experience visible and material. Fueled by diverse perspectives and ways of knowing, we create shared encounters with art and with one another to deepen understandings of the world and our place within it.
Discover more from Stories From The Block
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
