Federico Solmi (Italian, b. 1973) makes video installations, paintings and virtual reality works that use bright colours and satire to portray a dystopian vision of present-day society. Born in Bologna, he has lived and worked in New York since 1999.His animations merge painting with game engine aesthetics, and he uses motion capture and digital scripting to animate historical figures and world leaders.,
In 2009 Solmi received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Video & Audio category.His video installation Douche Bag City followed a Wall Street broker, Dick Richman, through animations structured as levels of a video game, each ending with the message “game over”.Solmi made its 3D world with the Australian artist Russell Lowe.It was shown at LMAKprojects Gallery in New York and then at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in 2010.,
The Great Farce (2017) was commissioned for the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt. The nine-projection video installation shows time-traveling world leaders, and a version of it entered the permanent collection of the Block Museum at Northwestern University. An adaptation, American Circus, appeared on electronic billboards in Times Square in July 2019.The Bacchanalian Ones (2021) is a virtual reality experience for Oculus Quest 2.The solo survey “Joie de Vivre” was held at the Morris Museum in New Jersey from September 2022 to February 2023.
His painting The Ship of Fools (2024) is based on Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa and fills a raft with powerful figures including Elon Musk, Marie Antoinette and Christopher Columbus.The curator Dorothy Kosinski co-curated the Venice exhibition “Federico Solmi: Ship of Fools” in 2024.The works in “Adrift”, held at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse in 2026, include three “video paintings” that begin as hand-drawn images and paintings and are scanned, mapped onto 3D models and animated with video-game engines.
