Biography
Carlo D’Orta (Florence, Italy, 1955). Artist. Photography and Installations. Lives and works in Rome.
He has pursued his passion for photography for 40 years. From 2003 to 2010 he attended advanced painting classes at the Rome University of Fine Arts (RUFA) and a Master in photography at IED in Milan, and devoted himself to the study of contemporary art. As a result, his photographic perspective undergoes a radical change. He abandons the documentary approach and try shots that tend towards abstraction, or tinged with a metaphysical/surrealist vision. The color sensitivity gained during the training gives his photographs a strong painting characterization, sometimes because of limited interventions in post-production on lights and colors.
He favors Architecture - focusing on de-contextualization of the details and the deformation produced by the reflection - and Dance.
To the Architecture he dedicates first series "Berlin: White, Grey, Light" and "Vibrations" (in which it is clear the influence of futuristic vision), and later, from 2012, the series "Biocities" and "Geometries Still Life "(where instead there is a strong reminiscence of Cubism, Constructivism and moving color fields). In 2013 also starts the series "(Re)FineArt" aiming at a metaphysical vision of the architecture of large industrial complexes and whose title is a deliberate and provocative pun, combining the concept of art with that of one of the productions polluting what it is refining.
To the Dance he approaches instead during his experience, from 2012, as component of the Board of National Academy of Dance. Born here the photographic series "Liquidance", where the focus is also often directed at particular decontextualized, shadows, vibration movement.
In the last two years his research knows more strong evolutions arriving to the series titled "(De)Compositions". Here D'Orta, thanks to the shoot position and zoom, realise a strong compression of perspective and transformed landscapes of contemporary architecture in abstract geometries in which three-dimensional depth disappears. But then, using the geometric fragments that make up these photographs, she creates installations in plexiglass and glass sculptures in which recovers, but in a new way, the three-dimensionality of the original architecture. This is a trip from the three-dimensional architecture to the two-dimensionality of a geometric abstraction and then again to the three-dimensionality of sculpture and installations formed by the geometric elements that made up the photograph. A conceptual circuit where you can maybe catch unconscious reminiscences of Malevich, Mondrian, El Lissitsky, Rothko, Peter Halley and others.
In the last five years he had solo shows in Venise (2015, “Beyond the Lens”, in Officina delle Zattere, exhibition around Biennale of Art), in Spoleto Contemporary Art Museum “Palazzo Collicola” (2013, “Biology of Inorganic”), in Italian Institut of Culture in Berlin, in Spazio Oberdan in Milan, and again in private galleries in Italy and Germany.
He has won or selected in many prizes. Carlo D’Orta’s art works can be found in public collections of Central Bank of Italy (Congress Centre, Rome), Contemporary Art Museum Palazzo Collicola (Spoleto, Italy), Italian Chamber of Deputies, Abate Zanetti Murano Glass High School Museum (Venise, Italy), Italian Institute of Culture (New York, USA), Architektenkammer Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart, Germany).
In 2015-2016 his photographics projects "(De)Compositions", "Liquidance" and "Vibrations" have been selected by Archive of Malerba Photografy Foundation.
Interviews to Carlo D’Orta have been published in italian and english in the magazines of art "Artitude", “ArToday” and “Aperitivo Illustrato” and in the magazine "Freccia" of Trenitalia.
