Cracking Art
Cracking Art is an art movement founded by an Italian collective in Biella in 1993, known for urban installations of giant animals made of recyclable, brightly colored plastic. Its founders - Omar Ronda, Alex Angi, Renzo Nucara, Carlo Rizzetti, Marco Veronese, and Vittorio Valente, the last soon replaced by Kicco - set out to make art with a strong social and environmental commitment. The name puns on 'cracking': the catalytic cracking that turns crude oil into plastic, and the split between humanity's natural origins and an increasingly artificial future. Plastic, the artists note, can be crushed and reshaped endlessly, so each installation's sculptures are recycled into the next - the 'regeneration' at the heart of the project. Oversized animals - snails, dolphins, and more - pop up in piazzas, parks, and palaces worldwide, from Milan and Siena to New York's Central Park.
Defining characteristics
- Monumental, toy-bright animals in saturated synthetic colors
- Recyclable plastic as the sole sculptural material, remelted and reshaped between shows
- Animals dropped unexpectedly into civic spaces - piazzas, parks, palaces
- Pop, mass-produced surfaces that read as both playful and alarming
- Serial herds: hundreds of repetitions of the same figure
Key figures
- Omar Ronda — Co-founder of the movement; left the group in 2008 for a solo career
- Alex Angi — Founding member of the collective
- Renzo Nucara — Founding member of the collective
- Marco Veronese — Founding member of the collective
- William Sweetlove — Artist who joined the collective in 2003
Example works
- 1000 dolphins in Milan — Cracking Art (1996)
- SOS World — Cracking Art (2001)
- Regeneration Art Project — Cracking Art (2013)
Sources
- Cracking Art - Wikipedia encyclopedia