Building Bridges : The Venice Biennale is an event that involves artists and intellectuals from all over the world: many works on display, many fans, scholars or, simply, the curious who come to the city to personally enjoy an almost magical atmosphere, full of culture and design.
Among the various Italian artists who have left their mark both for the work itself, and also for its meaning, stands out Lorenzo Quinn, son of the famous Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn. A face well-known in Venice (and not only for its origins), it left everyone speechless with its controversial sculpture Building Bridges, exhibited at the biennial of 2019. Monumental and majestic, the work has remained imprinted on participants, the press and admirers for the values and themes it brought with it on the occasion of such an important initiative for the world.
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Building Bridges: the union that wins over everything
During his career, Lorenzo Quinn has created several works with a strong humanitarian meaning: love, human connection, solidarity are just some of the themes dealt with his art that, in a perfect mix between large sculptures and a strong expressive and figurative charge, have always managed to strike at first glance.
Specifically, the work Building Bridges was immediately placed in the basin of the arsenal, in the Sestiere Castello di Venezia: it consists of a scenic work composed of six pairs of hands, each 15 meters high and 20 meters wide, indicating the proximity between the peoples. In short, what Quinn is an invitation to break down any type of difference (ethnic, religious, linguistic) focusing, rather, on union and collaboration.
It is no coincidence, in fact, that each pair of hands celebrates one of the six universal human values:
- friendship, which allows you to build a better future;
- wisdom, which allows you to make decisions that are good for everyone;
- aid, which is the basis of stable and lasting relationships;
- faith, which improves self-esteem and urges you to follow your own heart;
- hope, which spurs us to overcome obstacles in order to achieve a certain objective;
- love, the inevitable element to make any gesture.
But why the idea of a bridge? The artist, on this, was very clear: “Venice is a world heritage city and is the city of bridges – he said – is the ideal place to spread a message of world unity and peace so that many of us around the world build bridges with others rather than walls and barriers”.
Just as bridges unite distant territories, so Lorenzo Quinn’s Building Bridges connects human beings in the wake of a feeling of esteem, solidarity, friendship and love that can overcome any kind of discrimination.
Who is Lorenzo Quinn
Born on May 7, 1966 in Rome, Lorenzo Quinn is the son of actor Anthony Quinn and Iolanda Addolori. She lived between the United States and Italy, before moving to Barcelona, Spain, in 1988, after her marriage to Giovanna Cicutto.
His artistic career began in the early eighties with registration at the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York City and, at the same time, he also devoted himself to acting: he plays the young Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari in the film “Stradivari”directed by Giacomo Battiato in 1988 and the Spanish artist Salvador Dalì in “Dali”, together with the English actress Sarah Douglas, thanks to whom he won the award for best new actor at the Biarritz Film Festival.
During the early 2000s, Lorenzo decided to abandon his career as an actor to devote himself completely and exclusively to art, a winning choice that gave him great satisfaction from the start: his works, in fact, are part of public and private collections are exhibited all over the world, from England to Qatar, from the Netherlands to Singapore and are always distinguished by the deep attention to the shape of the hand, the human face and the perfect circle.
The sculpture Building Bridges of 2019 was not the only work exhibited in Venice: in 2017, in fact, Quinn had already presented himself at the Biennale with Support, inaugurated in the Grand Canal to draw attention to climate change and the inevitable rise in sea level. Two large hands came out of the water to “support” the walls of the Hotel Ca’ Sagredo, indicating the fact that only the hands of human beings can preserve and guard the world, avoiding its disintegration.
Quinn presented himself a third time in Venice, on the occasion of the Biennale 2022, with his new sculpture Baby 3.0: a child faces the Grand Canal in the garden of the Metropolitan City of Venice as a symbol of rebirth and tribute to the mystery of life that unites every human being and that, at the same time, gives hope for the future.
Also in 2022, on the occasion of the Fifa World Cup, Hyundai commissioned the artist the sculpture The Greatest Goal, that is a gigantic frame always embodied by two super majestic hands that, holding each other, symbolize the mission of the initiative: push for the world to unite in the name of sustainability.
Copertina: guidedtoursinvenice
