Alessio Boni, Julien Boudet, Toni Brugnoli, Tyrrell Winston

Greta Scarpa has the pleasure to introduce you to the subjects of sport and its symbols.

It is interesting to notice how lately the sport industry is engaging and integrating with the art world.

In September, the U.S. Open saw a collaboration for an artful medallion on the t-shirt of Chinese tennis player Wu Yibing, designed by artist Xu Lei, with the support of collector and X Museum founder Michael Xufu Huang.

According to the artist, it served as a “helping hand” to the player, and a smart move to communicate the museum’s existence to the world. On the same occasion the Armory Show presented a sculpture exhibition on the tennis championship’s grounds.

We could dare a parallelism with what happened in fashion and art within the last decade. Unsurprisingly, sportswear is a subculture that links fashion, sport, rituality and sense of belonging. Art is expanding more and more into life, always looking for new audiences and this could not be more contemporary. At the same time artists are looking at sport as a context of meaning and messages.

The artists I have selected for you are Julien Boudet (1985), Tyrrell Winston (1985) – with works coming from Stems Gallery, based in Brussels and recently located in Paris – and two young Italian artists/photographers, Alessio Boni (1982) and Tony Brugnoli (1990). The majority of these artists have crossed paths with fashion, photography, art and subcultures and each of them reflect on the meaning of sport and its symbols from different perspectives, approaches and cultural observations.