The Relais Monastero Santa Teresa located in Nardò has been regardedas an emblem of charm and refined hospitality in Europe. Today, an audacious encounter with contemporary art, gives to light, within the space of the ancient Baronial Palace of the XIII century converted into a monastery, to a site-specific installation that interacts with the environment between inside and outside. The fascinating complexity of the venue, creates the perfect "short circuit" between a deeppast and the present time, dialoguing in a game of references with the thought-provoking social and cultural themes of artistic research.
Art @The Monastery is a collection of prominent artists from the local and international scene.
Art Boutique Hotel is a concept for travelers and art lovers where the hotel stay becomes a cultural experience. Visitors can purchase works of art at the hotel and book an appointment with an expert for art advisory. The cultural approach is enhanced by a calendar of meetings open to the public with curators, artists and collectors in dialogue with the guests of the Relais.
Dario Agrimi
WORKS OF ART
Eclectic artist, born in Atri in Abruzzo in 1980, he works in the sphere of contemporary art with conceptual creations from the age of 18 years. He currently lives in Puglia. In his studio in Trani, a former industrial warehouse, he realizes works ranging from painting to installation, also favoring the photographic, sculptural and video fields. His latest experiments are the result of a maniacal research aimed at perfection, he stages a hyperrealism that amplifies emotions and reduces the distance between reality and fiction. He has participated in numerous collective and personal exhibitions in different cities, in Italy and abroad, including the 54th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition. Recently he has been as artist guest at several exhibitions including a personal exhibition at the Pino Pascali Museum Foundation. Agrimi has collaborated with a well-known British multinational company for the realization of the 2014 advertising campaign. The campaign itself has enjoyed worldwide visibility. Recently he has been involved in several international contemporary art fairs in Europe. Some works are present in important art collections both for private individuals and for Italian and foreign institutions. He is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari. He held illustrative workshops on his work, on the methods of creating a work of art and on the creative process in university and private environments. His works appear at the 57th International Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo Grassi, Punta dellaDogana, Guggenheim Museum in Venice and at the Mambo museum in Bologna.
Eva Caridi
WORKS OF ART
Eva Caridi was born in Corfu, Greece in 1972, in a family where art impregnated the walls of her home as her father; Spiro Caridi is a reknewd painter. This environment formed the artistic talent that Eva displays today in her ground breaking work. She has studied at Academy Julien in Paris under Almo Del Debbio and she is an award winning artist, (among others golden medal at Florence Biennial in 2005). She has exhibited her work in vibrant cities such as Paris, New York and London and widely in Italy. Along with being a very talented artist, she is a clear expression of that multicultural tradition that has positively marked all the European artistic movements from the fifteenth century onwards. Her visionary signature style is highlighted in a decisive way in her sculptures through a language that, while evoking classical statuary, an inevitable point of reference for a Greek artist, investigates with a modern language, which is expressed through the use of different materials such as raw plaster, iron or other "poor" materials, the relationship between the human condition and the flow of time. The artist’s works have a solid base of collectionism and appear in Public commissions such as theNational Airport of Corfu (Bust Sculpture of Ioannis Kapodistrias), Municipal Garden of Corfu (Bust of 1st Governor of Greece, Corfu Imperial Hotel, Corfu (Bust Sculptures of the Durell Brothers, Renowned Writers), A.T. Still University of Health and Science, Arizona USA and Ionian State Academy, Corfu, Greece.
Daniele Dell'Angelo Custode
WORKS OF ART
Daniele Dell'Angelo Custode was born in Mettman (Germany) in 1961, from immigrant parents. Once back in Italy, he attended the Art Institute of Nardò, in the home town of origin. Since his young age he started to experiment working the metal in his father's laboratory, in fact, his first creations date back to the 80s. From the very beginning he had a very special intuition in realizing the expressive potential of the metal element, deeply understanding and researching all its possible variants. Under his hands, a hard material like iron becomes docile like paper or clay because of the plasticity it manages to obtain. In such way also the works mostly vocated to abstractionism have a very strong communicative effect. Particular emphasis is given by the artist at his concept of territoriality that expands throughart the cultural and historical roots: one of his most recent and iconic study (still in progress) is inspired by the archaeological finding of an extinct prehistoric animal (the bull) that is the emblem of his city of origin, as well as the totemic works that were inspired by the archaicconstructions (dolmens and menhirs) of southern Italy. Dell’Angelo Custode, equally at ease with the abstract works and with figurative ones, creates installations from treated, abraded, scratched, bent metal surfaces, as well as monumental works that burst onto the urban scene of the squares, historical sites and parks in dialogue with the enviroment.
He has exhibited widely at international level in solo and collective exhibitions in vibrant cities such as Paris, Brussels, London, Berlin, Dubai, Lecce, Matera, Turin. He has a solid collectionism and works with public and private commissions.
Bogumil Ksiazek
WORKS OF ART
Bogumil Ksiazek is a Polish painter and an intellectual. He was born in Cracow in 1974. He graduated at the Cracow’s Academy of Fine Arts. The artist has lived and worked in Florence for many years. The Italan Culture and History of Art has deeply influenced and inspired his research. For Ksiazek, the practice of painting is a subject itself. His work explores intercultural themes with an exhistentialist approach and a strong focus on human condition. The eclectic fusion of abstract with a surrealistic figuration, create his very unique painting signature. The construction of the image, is frequently juxtaposed to swirling pictorial textures, almost informal tangles that deconstruct it, crush it and then return it with new and more complete essence in a mix of northern european pictorial memories and a mediterranean touch which gives a “warm” note to it. Currently he lives and works in Cracow, collaborating with galleries, museums and Institutions as well as teaching at the Academy of Fine Art . His works have been exhibited widely across Europe. They can be found in Museums and Institutions (a vast collection of the artist has been purchased by Frissiras Museum of Athens) and also appear in important private collections.
Vito Masi
WORKS OF ART
Belgian by birth, Vito Masi spent his early childhood and adolescence at Marchienne-au-Pont (Charleroi). The Flemish masters magic, caught live in museums and studied in school textbooks, enchanted the artist since his childhood: his sensitivity is nourished by evanescent and rarefied atmospheres and by the crepuscular fascination of North European modern art. The first stages of the artistic and expressive research led Vito Masi to be inspired by the early 1990s great painters; he interpreted and translated, in an intensely personal way, their absolute power of colour and the dynamic cut of the form. The artist was still young when he moved to Italy where he started his learning process that soon led him to master pictorial art and specialize in technical studies which will be essential for the spatial construction of his works. The first exhibition was hosted in the Archeological Provincial Museum of Potenza in October 1999 and the second one in 2001 was held in “La Scaletta” a Cultural Circle in Matera. Vito Masi was already mature to withdraw from a sort of “pictorial remake” and from his previous approach to figures: he built a pictorial style where the abstract component prevailed and the construction became lyric/ informal with images caught in their sensorial complexity. Recently, the artist has reached a summa of his previous experiences concerning informal abstractionism with the experimentation of numerous materials, from plaster to stucco, diluent bitumen and graphite (2008), up to the evocative works of digital photography with shots taken in atelier, of medium or big size, glued on stiff multilayer using different treatments (diluent bitumen, chalks and graphite) giving them a typical “earthy” veil. Vito Masi shows his complex personality in the latest works recalling crepuscular emotions which have struck his childhood, anxieties, turmoil and restlessness of a deep and eclectic soul. The paradigmatic images in Industrial Archaeology provide the ancient knowledge of a soul withdrawing into the past, of a sensitivity that has kept all the mood of the Belgian Pays Noir looking at the flow of time with a veiled sadness, sharing northern impulses of uncertainty and human being’s complexity.
Christos Pallantzas
WORKS OF ART
Christos Pallantzas is one of the most relevant artists from Greece. Also recognized at international level as one of the most refined examples of “Contemporary Master”. Pallantzas was born in Larissa, Greece, in 1962. He studied Painting at the Athens Academy of Fine Arts, under Dimitris Mytaras, Nikos Kessanlis and Dimosthenis Kokkinidis ,from 1982-1989. He has been awarded by the French Government with a grant of the Ecolé Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Paris at the atelier de la peinture of Pierre Carron, where he refined his artistic research and attended his post graduated studies. Pallanztas has studied in depth the great masters of the past and metabolized certain creative processes, but he expresses himself in total autonomy, strong in his vision of reality and his great ability to transpose his inner universe onto the canvas. Today many of his s works can be found in the Greek National Gallery, the Benaki Museum, the Florina Museum, the Kouvoutsakis Art Collection, the Frissiras Museum, the Agricultural Bank of Greece Collection, the Heracles Group of Companies Collection, and other private museums and collections in Greece and abroad. Moreover, his work was selected as representative of Greek Contemporary Art during the Olympic Games of 2004.
Ulderico Tramacere
WORKS OF ART
Ulderico Tramacere was born in Lecce in 1975. Currently lives and works in Milan. Asan eclectic and actively engaged author, he discovers the media of photography self-taught but "the spiritual encounter" with some of the greatest contemporary masters transforms him profoundly and lead to refine his training. He is currently one of the most interesting emerging photographers in the Italian art scene and highly recognized by the Art critics. His powerful black and white images emphatically tell of events, landscapes and atmospheres of today's Italy, to arouse a cultural and social reflection of the impact of human action on the environment. Intimately linked to his native land and to the millenary wisdom of rural culture, Tramacere uses symbols and metaphors to return his poetic visual story, to the present times. He won prestigious photography awards and he is author of publications, exhibiting his work in prestigious galleries and institutions. Furthermore the artist participates to international contemporary art fairs.
Among his bodies of works: "Nylon", Mia Photo fair 2018, (in 2017 he won the "Piaceri d'Italia", "Film plastici" (2016), "Arneo" award with the work "Pecora Nera" "(Ed. Grifo, 2015)," Lente di Fresnel "(2004-in progress), today serves as the" signature "of the author and his personal research on the photographic portrait," Liber Monstrorum de diversis generibus "(2012), contemporary bestiary exhibited at the Italian Center of Author Photography and at Art Vilnius, "The magic eye" (2012), tribute to the extraordinary gaze of fellow photographers, published by Il raggio verde.