So far, Bomb Gallery has been developed by the following artists:

Fabio Giorgi Alberti

Nathan Gwynne

Anita Kapraljevic

Josip Mijic

 Stjepan Miloš

Aleksandar Nesic

Cristina Rodrigo

Friederike Ruff

Texts and PR: Gabriela M. Keller

Fabio Giorgi Alberti is disrupting our viewing patterns: Combining pictures which at first glance do not seem to have anything to do with each other, he challenges our perception of the world around us. He shows the picture of an old, homeless woman next to an image of the sea. A statue of Holy Mary and Jesus appears next to a metro tunnel. The photographer dissolves parts of everyday life from their ordinary surroundings and brings the elements into a new, unexpected context. What is familiar, turns mysterious, what is known turns strange. References and cross connections are being alluded to, but do not open up directly. The spectator is expected to take up the loose ends construct the new context of meaning himself. Fabio Giorgi Alberti wants to cause short-circuits in people’s comprehension. The artist, who is currently working on his thesis at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, focuses on photography and installation. In recent years, he was delving into video production, which he then abandoned as he found the forced sequentiality of frames too much of a constraint for his audience. His artistic practice, however, requires the mental freedom and flexibility of the spectator. Again and again, the artist roams through his hometown Rome with his camera, searching for themes and moods. What interests him most are places and buildings: His work is based on the awareness that a multitude of associations, connotations and memories is superimposed on our perception of buildings as parts of our daily lives. In his work, he carefully removes these layers of reality one after the other. In the combination of his images, causal, logical and local references lose their validity. Instead, Fabio Giorgi Alberti follows colour, shapes and lines.  As a result, everyday, banal and mundane things unfurl a confusing and contradictory poetic quality. 

Nathan Gwynne The son of wayward LA hippies turned Northern California vegetarian restaurateurs, Nathan Gwynne was born in 1979 in Santa Rosa, CA. His earliest cultural encounters were with macramé, macrobiotics, and MTV. His interests emerge from collisions and confl ations of pastoral hippie utopianism, suburban punk rock idealism, and urban subculture. He explores the forms, styles, postures, and paraphernalia of these social networks as sources and structures. His work is further informed by the anarchistic approach of Dada and cut-up technique of Surrealism, filtered through the geometry, repetition, and phenomenology of Minimalism. Nathan Gwynne received a BA from Stanford University in 2001 and MFA from Hunter College in 2009. He follows a nomadic and intuitive path between media in work that spans sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, sound and video and includes collaborative projects in the form of bands and the production of music videos and vinyl LPs. He performs as a drummer with music groups, currently including The Love Loves and The Ice Machine and Swift.

Anita Kapraljevic Painting is and remains Anita Kapraljevis’s favourite media. Quite often, however, figures that come to life in her paintings or drawings spark the idea for performances. Therefore, the artist continually searches for new ways to combine performance and painting: She started with performances using a mask and no language. Later, she also involved other, likewise mute participants in costumes and arranged them in installations reminiscent of film scenes. Then she gathered a group of painters who painted together like one single artist. Another of her projects was to copy the pictures of the new generation of painters in order to highlight the fact that every work of art, no matter how unique, is always a reference to something that has been created before. During the foundation of the Speranza Lion Club in Rome, a project of Christian Jankowski’s class, Anita Kapraljevic contributed to the exhibition Rome is Our Gallery. A tour bus took visitors to different stations in the city, at which performances were shown. In Rome, the idea of looking for the ideal picture also came to her. For her painting performance Trans Universe – The Moment Of Divine Presence, she joined the multitude of portrait painters which gathers daily on the Piazza Navona in Rome. On that square, she started portraying people in the style of the Nazarenes, an association of German painters in the early 19th century who copied paintings of saints from the Renaissance. Accordingly, Anita Kapraljevic depicted the passers-by on Piazza Navona as saints. During that process, she kept humming the John Lennon song Across the Universe. Its composition was modeled on a mantra, the Sanskrit phrase: Victory to God Divine. 40 years ago the Nasa took the song literally and beamed it into space hoping for aliens to hear the melody. Anita Kapraljevic tapped into the power of the song as a mantra in order to create an image of holiness. She used her painting performance to demonstrate that every human being is holy, each of us is a son or a daughter of God. That means, we are all poets, lovers or heroes refl ected in the Holy Spirit. We are the light of the world.

Josip Mijic There are some basic visual characteristics of the new works of painter Josip Mijic that point to deeper meaning. On one level, his works are regularly structured using two surfaces: the base (foundation) and the changing world built on the base. Two colors are stressed: black and gray. The colors are unambiguous and the square forms are emphasized through relief in the surface of the base. Each of the expressional characteristics suggests potential layers of mental substrata that emerge from what can be experienced and what can be felt. Josip Mijic’s work abounds with living beings. Rational being is represented in the form of squares, while nonrational being is represented through fl owing, struggling, disturbing forms that constitute the base of the images. But just as the base is not rational, it is at the same time tactile. We stand on the ground and the ground tests us. The world that is built upon the ground is also non-rational. It can only be seen; it cannot be felt; it cannot be tested; it can only be believed. The world of Mijic’s paintings is not as material as the world of the base, of the earth. The world of the paintings is brighter and lighter, even though it is gray. Those two worlds meet on a restless line, on the horizon, on a meeting point that can barely be seen: half-light, dawn. Within this troubled light there smolders a flame of hope. It is the hope that within a particular continuity there is the enriching possibility of freely realizing every living form and every living being,even every square. Though each continuity is bound in Mijic’s works, the limitations brutally emphasized by the steel frames that are part of the visual painting, the squares are incorporated in trembling, lyrical sequences that resemble the liberty of realization of every being that lives in their respective box, inside the free fl ow of infi nity; infinity that reveals itself to those who have enough belief.

Stjepan  Miloš shows characteristics of an exception personality in painting technique and also in art stylization. The main characteristics of his art expression are minimal purity of shown motives, and on the other side is a sensitive social sensibility as a basic criterion of choosing motives. By showing the world into the black-white shades Miloš creates the atmosphere of melancholic depression in which human fi gures in spite of emphasizes figurative resemble more on its own shadows than the concrete living human beings.

Cristina Rodrigo The structure of Cristina Rodrigo’s paintings arises from pure colour. Her pictures do not depict any fi gurative content. Instead, they are informed by the language of poetic dialogue and emotion which does not take any concrete shape but uses human sensitivity in order to explore the fundamentals of the unconscious world we glimpse at in our dreams and imagination. At the same time, her paintings pave the way for the aesthetic perception into her conceptual world. Basing her work on reduction by using minimalist elements such as ice thread or light, she emphasizes her materials and uses them - in combination with objects such as monitors – as road maps into a public context. Her video Live Show raises questions about consumerism. Accumulating a pile of monitors, she refers to the poetic discourse of the digital era. The pile stands as a monument for the throwaway society whose members pursue their lifestyle in total disregard of the environment. Ignorant of its near extinction, the monitor still maintains the power to continue the work it was built for: Faithful to its duty, its screen absorbs the light of the real world and re-broadcasts our life. For each and every one of us, reality is modeled on the esthetic of the images we see, made easily consumable as a tv program. The installation Flacas considers more than the modern model of contemporary beauty in a fashion show. It raises questions about the influence of marketing and advertissment and how fashion affecte us. The mode industry sell joy, values, success, sexuality, popularity, uniformity. Threads and bones sketch a silhouette. This thinness movement fades in the mass with its light bodymovement.

Friederike Ruff directs her marveling eye at herself and at her contemporaries. During her expeditions, she collects impressions, findings, cut-outs from newspapers, books and mail order catalogues, copies of antique copper etchings, travel souvenirs, kitsch, advertisement pictures and religious depictions. The artist takes the flotsam and jetsam from everyday life and combines it with elements of abstract painting and drawing. In her collages, which are highly complex with regard to both their form and their content,  Friederike Ruff  carefully plumbs layer after layer of our contemporary world. Her subtle analysis is deeply rooted in the visual structure and in the material culture of our times. What she assembles mainly stems from the rummage table of globalised consumerism, yet always alludes to higher, transcendental hopes. All the big labels invite to the Dance of Vanities and hold out the possibility of an instant redemption, with products promising love, sex, success, fun and eternal youth at bargain price. Everything is for sale, everything is commodifi ed. By confronting the strongest contrasts possible,  Friederike Ruff is shaping a visual world rife with paradox. As a result, her works explore how the consumer goods industry mirrors strategies and mechanisms of religious reverence: The individual in  Friederike Ruff’s collages believes in the epiphany of advertisement, they worship products like fetishes and bring sacrifice to a greedy idol who keeps asking for more. Thus conflating the material and the ideal, the artist transfers the approach of Magical Realism into an urgently topical, political-economic dimension. In accordance with this aesthetic model, Friederike Ruff is pursuing the aim of creating a third reality, in which the profane and the magical world of mythology and religion merge into one.