M+M Gallery at ART021 Shanghai 2025

M+M Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the 2025 ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, located at the Approach Unit booth P03. The gallery will present a curated selection of works by three artists: Alessandro Twombly, Francesco Cima, and Li Fang.

Alessandro Twombly (b. 1959) was born in Rome. His vibrant paintings and richly textured sculptures reveal his deep connection with the rural life of the Roman countryside.

Twombly is very familiar with the plants and animals of the countryside and understands the long geological changes of the land. He described his relationship with nature by saying, “I approach nature the way other artists approach the nude.” In other words, he takes nature as the starting point of his creation, but instead of simply depicting the flowers and plants before him, he transforms them into abstract psychological feelings.

In his paintings, he expresses his state of mind through vibrant colors and bold brushstrokes. Twombly places the canvas on the ground and applies paint directly with his hands, creating broad and expressive strokes. He is skilled at using color, layering bright tones one upon another, precisely controlling light and shadow to create subtle variations.

This sense of intimacy with nature also extends to his sculptures. The fingerprints left on his materials show his attempt to create abstract effects through a “subtractive” approach, rather than taking external natural scenes as his main model. Twombly’s sculptures present the “inner power” of nature, pushing a certain energy toward the light, allowing the work to be illuminated and thus reveal its own form.

Francesco Cima (b. 1990) graduated in visual arts at Academy of fine arts in Venice in 2019. He currently lives and works in Venice. Since 2015, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. The many exhibition spaces he's showed his works in include: galleria A+A, Venice (2015); Tulla culture center, Tirana (2017); Marselleria, Milan (2017); Monitor Gallery, Rome (2018); Spazio Buonasera, Turin (2018); Museo Santa Mar. della Scala, Siena (2018); Spazio Ferramenta, Turin (2018); Giudecca Art District, Venice (2019); Galleria Massimodeluca, Venice Mestre (2019); infine, Spazio Punch, Venice (2020). In 2017 his works were present at the Parallel Vienna art fair, in 2019 at Art Zagreb and Art Verona. In 2020 he completed a residency program at Palazzo Monti (Brescia), and then participated in the group show "Hyperbole" curated by Domenico De Chirico at Galleria Nicola Pedana di Caserta in 2021.

The attention to detail, as well as the instinctive ability to connect seemingly distant physical and temporal spaces are some of the peculiarities that characterize Francesco Cima’s paintings. After relentless experimentation, landscape has become his favoured genre. In Cima’s landscapes the human figure rarely appears, offering greater space to other living species, or alternatively to treasured objects of his imagination. Through thinly painted brushstrokes, Cima does not simply render views, but vast territories where infinitely many dimensions can find refuge, pushing the material confines of the oil painting beyond the imaginable. Although the topographical richness of Versilia (north-western Tuscany) remains one of the main sources of inspiration for the artist, a territory rich with sea, hills, and mountains, there is no lack of vast deserts, Venice cityscapes, and other mysterious lands in his paintings. The main file rouge in his works is the presence of a crepuscular light that softly embraces the majority of his settings, echoing the emotional reverberations of Romanticism, to which Cima feels strongly indebted.

Li Fang (1933-2020) graduated in 1955 from the Taiwan Provincial Normal College (now National Taiwan Normal University). In 1957, together with Liu Kuo-sung and Kuo Tung-jung, she co-founded the Fifth Moon Group, becoming one of the most important Chinese female artists advocating the modernization and abstraction of Chinese art. In 1959, recommended by Chu Teh-chun, she went to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After her marriage, she settled in the Swiss mountains with her husband, the Swiss artist Hans Brun. Their simple and tranquil lifestyle profoundly shaped her distinctive artistic style.

Li Fang’s early works are characterized by bold brushstrokes and rich, textured colors that merge the essence of traditional Chinese ink painting with Western modern art. From the 1970s onward, her works returned to depicting nature, expressing poetic elegance through intricate brushwork and bright, lucid tones.

Li Fang participated in the major exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1949–1970 at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Her works are now part of significant international museum collections, including M+ in Hong Kong, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and FAMM in France.