A presentation of recent drawings reveals Solmi’s acumen including new works that reinterpret the digital skeletons and virtual architecture of his 3-D renderings into white pen and ink and gouache drawings on black paper. In essence, he reverses the digital process by bringing the hand back to reveal what is beneath the video image created using animation software. Its political subject matter aside, the quality of line Solmi achieves in these drawings displays the intricacies of Paolo Uccello and Albrecht Durer’s drawings, and the chiaroscuro of a Goya painting. This series of large-scale drawings bring a rarely seen aspect of his work to this exhibition – his first in the gallery’s new location. 

Lastly, Solmi’s phantasmagoric world of whirling space, jerking movement and oscillating facades that strive to overwhelm the viewer’s visual field is pushed to extremes in a new interactive Virtual Reality installation. This work, presented in its own gallery, invites the visitor to enter the Bacchanal by donning a VR mask and manipulating two hand-held controllers in order to pick the perspective of one of his historical avatars. Newly empowered, and emboldened, the visitor is able to control the narrative, allowing them to experience the debauchery up close and personal through their embodiment of the avatar. 

Federico Solmi is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Video & Audio (2009) and has been a visiting professor at Yale University School of Art and Drama. Recent and forthcoming solo and group exhibitions include Thinking about History, The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University (2021); Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2021); Federico Solmi: The Bacchanalian Ones, Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro New Jersey (2020); and The Dissolve, SITE Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico (2010). Solmi’s monumental opus, The Great Farce (2017), was recently acquired by the Phillips Collection and Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art.  His work was prominently featured in New York in 2019 in Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment and has also been included in numerous international exhibitions and biennials, including The Tides of The Century at the Ocean Flower Island Museum in Danzhou, China (2021), The Quest for Happiness—Italian Art Now, Serlachius Museum Gosta, Mantta, Finland (2019), the Beijing Media Art Biennale (2016), Frankfurt B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt, Germany, (2015, 2017) in which he won the BEN AWARD in 2015, the First Shenzhen Animation Biennial in China (2013), and the 54th Venice Biennial (2011). Solmi was born in 1979 in Bologna, Italy and is currently based in New York.

Founded in 2007, the Gallery’s move to downtown's Arts District represents the fourth iteration and location of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and marks our 11th year in Los Angeles.
For further information, including images and previews, please call (213) 395-0762, or email: gallery@luisdejesus.com.