Federico’s exhibitions, which often combine articulate installations composed of different media such as video, drawings, mechanical sculptures and paintings, use bright colors and a satirical aesthetic to portray a dystopian vision of our present day society. Irreverent, surrealistic, and sexually explicit, the videos and the works by Federico Solmi are as he is: extravagant, rowdy and ironic. They are satires about the evilness and the vices that affect contemporary society and mankind. The artist uses images culled from the video game industry, pop culture, and the Internet and collages them with a historical influence to produce original artworks about the seemingly disparate subject at hand. The universe that Solmi likes to represent is the exaltation of a present that is crumbling apart. His work is a criticism of a system that approves and trusts without questioning the fragile foundation on which our culture and post-modernist society is based.
In the year 2009, Federico Solmi was awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation of New York with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in the category Video & Audio.
Solmi’s videos were featured in the First Shenzhen Animation Biennial in China (2013) and the 54 th Venice Biennial (2011), in the exhibition entitled "Italians Do It Better". His work was included in the year 2010 at the Site Santa Fe Biennial, an exhibition curated by Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco. Solmi has exhibited in the following museums and Institutions for Contemporary art: Centre De Pompidou, Palais De Tokyo, Paris; Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid; Drawing Center, New York; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Arts, Israel; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai; Australian Center of Moving Images, Melbourne; Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta, India; Contemporary Art Center of Rouboix, Palazzo Delle Arti, Naples; Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy. In addition, his video animations have been screened in several film and video festivals, such the Kassel Documentary film and video festival, Tina B, Prague; The London International animation festival; Loop Barcelona; IndieLisboa, Lisbon; Impakt Film and Video festival, Utrecht.
