über Quayola

Italian artist Quayola uses technology to explore the tensions and balance between seemingly opposing forces: the real and the artificial, the figurative and the abstract, the old and the new. He constructs immersive installations in which he engages with canonical images and reinterprets them through contemporary technology. Landscape painting, classical sculpture, and iconography are a few examples that serve as starting points for Quayola’s hybrid compositions.
His work has been shown worldwide, including at the V&A Museum in London, National Art Center in Tokyo, UCCA in Beijing, SeMA in Seoul, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Park Avenue Armory in New York, and on the occasion of Ars Electronica in Linz and the Sundance Film Festival.


Website of Quayola

In the rolling hall of Zinkfabrik Altenberg, where monumental machines interacted with humans for more than 100 years, Italian artist Quayola presents Sculpture Factory, an industrial robot that models endless variations of antique-looking sculptures from blocks of material. The artist replaces the sculptor's unique dexterity with a machine intelligence controlled by algorithms, and in it questions the increasing superfluity of human action in the face of advancing automation.

Visitors experience in real time how new sculptures are created from the “hand” of the industrial robot. Inspired by Michelangelo's technique of “non-finito” (the “unfinished”), the installation explores the tensions between form and matter, the real and the artificial, the old and the new.
Similar to how museums view historical industrial forms in the mirror of today’s societies, Sculpture Factory uses cutting-edge technology to establish a dialogue about forms of creative work from antiquity to the future.

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