At Studio G7 Gallery, students from the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts compose an exhibition in which images are amplified by thought. On the occasion of Opentour, the exhibition The Image Thinking. On the Possible Interpretations of the Image, curated by artist and professor Giovanna Caimmi and art historian and curator Leonardo Regano, presents the outcomes of a workshop conducted by the two curators as part of the Painting Master’s program, under professor Luca Caccioni’s mentorship. At the core of the research there is the concept of image thinking, as theorized by video artist and cultural theorist Mieke Bal: a generative process of thought-images in which the areas of perception and concept are condensed into the artistic product.
AA.VV., “The Image Thinking”, 2025, installation view at Studio G7, Bologna. Courtesy Galleria Studio G7. Ph credit Francesco Rucci
Among the works on view, Agnese Oprandi unsettles the viewer with the series Bambin* Sperdut* (2025). In line with her challenging poetics, she invites us to question the present by recounting an experience shared by her generation. She repurposes a camper television set, a technological tool that evokes her childhood, and asks the spect-author to adopt her perspective – the screen at Oprandi’s height – to observe a figure which repetitively removes and replaces a fox-skin mask. One senses the frustration of a symbolic act that finds neither time nor space to be completed, a failed conclusion that becomes a metaphor for the deprivation of growth and self-realization. Thus Oprandi aims to redeem the generation of bambin* perdut*, lost children, whose asterisks shine like stars as desire, orientation, and possibility that are placed in the title, as finding such stars in today’s world and historical moment proves a difficult task.
AA.VV., “The Image Thinking”, 2025, installation view at Studio G7, Bologna. Courtesy Galleria Studio G7. Ph credit Francesco Rucci
Capofortuna (2025) by Enrico Scapinelli lies on the same threshold between hope and urgency, cloaked in playfulness: a capsule toy dispenser whereby the artist sells, for one euro, a single dose of fertile soil. A seemingly frivolous gesture, sold at an oddly modest price, prompts reflection on two levels. On one hand, the opportunity to access land, care for it, and contribute on an individual scale to a global emergency; on the other, the risk that such a gesture might be absorbed by the mechanisms of consumerism, turning access into privilege. In the form of a gadget, Scapinelli hands over both the benefit and the burden of contemplating our present and future environmental condition.
AA.VV., “The Image Thinking”, 2025, installation view at Studio G7, Bologna. Courtesy Galleria Studio G7. Ph credit Francesco Rucci
From the ground up, and with similar irony, rises Chiedilo al mio ex (2025) by Chiara Niccoli, a pile of car tires bristling with nail spikes. The work calls upon a human and collective experience, a romantic disappointment in its angry phase, which often gives way to vindictive compensation for emotional wounds. The thought-image is condensed in the materials themselves, in the rubber’s hardness and the stabbing sharpness of the nails: thus capturing the final transformation of tenderness and delicacy into an akin product of their absence – or destruction.
AA.VV., “The Image Thinking”, 2025, installation view at Studio G7, Bologna. Courtesy Galleria Studio G7. Ph credit Francesco Rucci
Marco Mandorlini presents seven works from the series Lentiggini (2025). Glass plates appear to enclose what seem to be enlarged microscope slides containing an alchemical culture of golden and leaden. A closer inspection reveals pieces of shading net colonized by lichen. The gaze extends, and these organisms, in turn, hide something else: peaks that reveal themselves as noses, glass-printed UV images of pre and post-operative states. Mandorlini brings together unlike materials and concepts, focusing them into cartographies of hidden plots observed through glass.
AA.VV., “The Image Thinking”, 2025, installation view at Studio G7, Bologna. Courtesy Galleria Studio G7. Ph credit Francesco Rucci
Yunru Quan explores her area of interest in Germogli (2025), felt wool tentacles sprouting from concrete like buds of unexpected origins and forms. Quan’s poetics is nourished by the bond between nature and femininity and is driven by a process of slowness, meticulousness, and cyclicality. The work draws from an imaginary inspired by the sprouting of a potato as a fuel for thought on the end and beginning of a cycle: the tentacle suckers become tools to cling to life, just like the sprout that both decays and revives the solanaceous plant, whose leaves bloom and reincarnate as vulvas. The works stem from individual investigations which, within the exhibition path, engage in a virtuous dialogue shaped by irony, speculation and imaginative immersion.
Ayleen Ivonne Liverani
Info:
Opentour 2025: The Image Thinking. Sulle possibili interpretazioni dell’immagine
Artists: Marco Mandorlini, Chiara Niccoli, Agnese Oprandi, Yunru Quan, Enrico Scapinelli
curated by Giovanna Caimmi and Leonardo Regano, with the coordination of Maria Rosa Cuccitto
26/06 – 30/07/2025
Galleria Studio G7
Via Val d’Aposa 4a – Bologna
www.galleriastudiog7.it
Ayleen Ivonne Liverani, a cultural practitioner in the fields of edu-curatorship and mediation, works between Italy and Mexico and explores the art world as a space for exploration and questioning, and as an opportunity to create and narrate alternative imaginaries.
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