Nicola Gobetto

Born 1980 in Milan, Italy, Nicola Gobetto lives and works in Milan, Italy. Nicola Gobbetto is interested in the language of form and the possible shapes form can take, in forms that are formless, and in their complete dissolution. He takes as his starting point themes from art history, popular history and the children’s world – as regards the latter, in particular interpretations of fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney.

He then abstracts or alienates these forms to the point where they become irritating and disturbing. The sculpture named Boys & Girls that Gobbetto has devised for Art & Entrepreneurship is made up of a series of pink and bright-blue triangular shapes, each mounted on three legs with industrial castors attached to them, enabling the piece as a whole to mutate and transform easily in space. The colors refer to the social convention of gender color coding for infants and contrast sharply with the almost ridiculous form (minitables on wheels), while at the same time the triangle echoes the geometrical shapes of constructivist abstraction.

The explicit wonder and fascination for the workings of society is something that occurs in many of Gobbetto’s works. Here the triangular minitables can be understood as representing individuals or clusters as part of a whole, thus literally describing the various entrepreneurial values that stood as a starting point: The Italian’s style stands out for its ostensible naivete and innocence while always containing autoreflective and satirical traits in its acutely penetrative presentation into social conventions. It is this ability that makes Gobbetto such a lovable rascal among the new generation of artists. Nicola Gobbetto’s works went on show in 2007, among others, at Centre PasquArt in Biel, in Rome’s Palazzo Fendi and in the Museo Pecci in Prato. In 2007 he was nominated for the renowned Furla Prize.

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