Idea UNIKA 2025

Ert tl zënter - 10th Anniversary

Contemporary Sculpture and Painting in the Village Centre of Val Gardena: Ortisei, S. Cristina and Selva di Val Gardena
July to September 2025

Participating artists

Kreuzer Rupert Elias
Holzknecht Christian STL
Piazza Ivo
Senoner Wilhelm
Armin Grunt
Senoner Fabrizio
Zuckermann Chelita
Sieff Matthias

“Ie é na idea” – I’ve got an idea! With these words, spoken by an artist from the UNIKA group, a new and ambitious cultural initiative was born ten years ago: Idea UNIKA – ert tl zënter. Today we celebrate the 10th anniversary of this biennial event, which from the very beginning has aimed to highlight the art rooted in the centuries-old tradition and craftsmanship of Val Gardena.

Idea UNIKA brings art into the heart of the villages of Val Gardena, transforming public spaces into places of encounter and dialogue between artworks, artists, and the public. For this special edition, eight sculptors from the UNIKA group present brand-new sculptures and installations, the result of creativity, technical expertise, and a deep love for natural materials. Each artist freely chose the theme, materials, and dimensions, giving life to an exhibition that celebrates the extraordinary variety and inventiveness of local artistic craftsmanship.

The event, organized for the 6th time by the UNIKA group in collaboration with the municipalities of Ortisei, Santa Cristina, Selva di Val Gardena, Castelrotto and Laion, along with the Tourist Associations of Val Gardena, has established itself as a must-see cultural event held every two years.

On this special occasion, eight artists engage in dialogue through their works with the urban and natural environment, offering the public an authentic glimpse into the vitality of Val Gardena’s sculptural tradition, reinterpreted in a contemporary way. The open-air exhibition is curated by Nicoletta Tamanini, curator from Rovereto.

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Show route

Kreuzer Rupert Elias

Anna

Ortisei, Promenade

Characterised by a profound, contemporary feel, the works of Rupert Elias Kreuzer demonstrate a clear, indissoluble connection with major Gardena sculpture but, above all, with the irrepressible, irresistible urge of young artists that were born or trained in the Ladin valley to devise and develop new expressive languages or alternative styles to the usual sculptural forms. The protagonists of Kreuzer‘s work are often adolescents, therefore creatures that are constantly growing and changing, daring and insecure, joyful and melancholy at the same time, introverted and simultaneously eager for a relationship, for a gratifying dialogue. “Anna”, the original sculpture proposed by the artist for this Biennial is magnificent, a successful embodiment of such an intricate, complex, emotional and compelling plot. The young woman depicted, though anchored to her roots, is in fact joyfully projected, with her arms symbolically mutated into branches growing out into space, towards a future filled with adventure, knowledge and positive encounters. Yet at the same time the young creature, longing for peace, is still searching for her own emotional stability, for a psychological and spiritual balance that will make her fully alive and conscious as a woman and as a human being.

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Holzknecht Christian STL

The four elements

Ortisei, Cultural Centre

Trained in a family of painters, Christian Stl, a long-time polychromist before specializing in Florence, has always been fascinated by the body and, specifically, by the human face. A painstaking investigator of the myriad emotional nuances that characterize every creature, after illustrating their intricacies in the recent cycle dedicated to the “Seven Cardinal Sins”, the artist has developed a profound, heartfelt reflection on what is truly essential for contemporary man. In an age of technological hyperconnectivity, binge media consumption and compulsive accumulation, Christian Stl turns his attention to the four elements, earth, water, air and fire, considered by all cultures as fundamental components of Nature. The outcome is large, captivating works in which rapid and spontaneous paint strokes and skilful use of colour combine beautifully with the evocative power and warmth of fire, the ethereal, infinite nature of air and the impetuous embrace of water that engulfs and overwhelms everything. In the large-sized work dedicated to the Earth, the artist finally reproposes his interest in the human body by delineating a sort of giant, perhaps a new, modern Golem moulded from crude material, who suddenly wakes up, animated by a thousand sparks. Only from all this can and must man start out again in order to be reborn…

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Piazza Ivo

Wooow… a marvellous view

Ortisei, Pedestrian area

A diligent heir to the great Gardena school, Ivo Piazza started out from traditional sculpture based on a religious and sacred theme and has, over time, moved away from this, reproposing both refined figures in a delicate balance between the elegant Gothic style and the canons of classical representation and more abstract compositions characterised by a masterly synthesis between the formal and volumetric elements of his works. An excellent draughtsman, with a profound knowledge of all types of wood, the artist is currently reviving his interest in the human figure by reproposing it in a powerfully contemporary style. Having slimmed down the forms and deliberately omitted all distinguishing elements, the sculptor focusses his attention in particular on the faces of curious beings, whose elongated faces, long necks and barely suggested bodies take on a strong totemic significance. While on the one hand the large spectacles masking the gaze of the three characters and the colouring of the sculptures that embellish the pedestrian centre of Ortisei lighten up the whole with a gentle irony, on the other, they shroud these presences in even greater mystery, transforming them either into genuine portals to a future world or, perhaps, into aliens amazed by the beauty of the Dolomites and their towns and villages.

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Senoner Wilhelm

The rhythm of being

Ortisei, St. Anthony’s Chapel

It is a cultured and profound world the one in which Wilhelm Senoner moves, a painter and sculptor born and raised in Ortisei in a setting shaped by artistic tradition, which led him to develop his natural talent and become a nationally and internationally renowned artist. His stylised, powerful and solid figures, featuring rough surfaces, smoothed profiles as sharp as rocks and produced from linden wood, acrylic paint, earth and glue, are clearly inspired, as the artist himself points out, by the Dolomites. These enigmatic presences of his are a masterly evolution in a sculpture that since the Romanesque period has captured experiences and suggestions of the great masters of art history, manifesting itself in a “futuristic” present. A new world where formal minimalism and the vestiges of a wise archaism delineate totemic beings characterised by an evident sacred quality that is different. The work “The rhythm of being” underscores, with the force of its physicality and an undoubtedly expressive power, also deliberately accentuated by a color scheme inextricably linked to the materiality of mountains, the urgency of recuperating a dimension in which the human being, though always precariously balanced, experiences the entire adventure on Earth serenely, fully and with confidence.

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Armin Grunt

Natalem quo vadis?

Ortisei, S. Antonio Square
S. Cristina, Municipal square
Selva Val Gardena, Church Square

The original and unconventional artist Armin Grunt has made his dry, expressionist style his hallmark. Starting out with a figurative approach, which he gradually distanced himself from, he has matured a language “devoid of complacency and affectation that is simple but effective” which, by respecting the characteristics of the wood he uses, enables him to penetrate, as few are able, the complexities of the human soul and to address the theme of dialogue and relationships in a truly contemporary way. After stretching the dimensions of his extraordinary, memorable figures, the artist has for some years now enjoyed devising sculptural groups of a remarkable visual and emotional impact, in which the individual statues represent modules in the construction of a broader narrative. In this exhibition, the artist investigates the subject of the Nativity, a cherished theme that identifies and is perhaps even predictable of traditional Gardena sculpture. This Grunt boldly reinterprets in his original style, using a modality that is innovative yet dense in meaning and spirituality inherent in “walking together”, a Nativity scene spread over the territory, positioned in three distinct groups in front of the churches of Ortisei, Santa Cristina and Selva di Val Gardena.

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Senoner Fabrizio

Do la saison

S. Christina, Pedestrian area

Having trained as a young man in the workshop of his father Silvio and completed his education at the University of Innsbruck, Fabrizio Senoner is a free spirit, playful and graciously ironic. In his ever-changing choice of subjects, painting techniques, oil, acrylic paint, pencil or spray, or creative techniques, such as media or digital, the artist conceals behind this mutating, exuberant and ever-evolving aspect of his work, a remarkable sensitivity, a particular gentleness of spirit and a deep, poetic sentiment. A testimony to this is the large mural created by the artist and dedicated to an elderly man wearing a typical South Tyrolean apron, captured serene in a brief moment of rest. As the Ladin phrase “After the season is before the season” embroidered on his apron expresses so well, it highlights the relentless commitment of the mountain people, precious testimonies of existences punctuated by the rhythms of Nature and custodians of an environment that is as fragile as it is precious. The man, proud of his wrinkles, with his sharp, slightly ironic gaze, is a reassuring presence in the chaotic whirlwind of modern-day life that is forgetting, perhaps deliberately denying, its roots thereby losing the true meaning of human existence.

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Zuckermann Chelita

Orca pup

S. Christina, Pedestrian area

Imagination, weightlessness, dynamism and extreme vitality… these are the emotions that the splendid baby Orca, or killer whale, forged in stainless steel by Chelita Zuckermann, the only woman taking part in Idea UNIKA 2025, arouses in us. Born in Mexico where she worked as an architect until 2006, Chelita Zuckermann gradually turned to art and specifically painting. She then discovered in the original sculptural language she devised, in which metal and steel take on an undisputed leading role, a genuine opportunity to combine her original training with the overpowering creativity with which she has always been gifted. Fascinated since a young age by the luxuriant nature of her homeland, Zuckermann accordingly offers plants, insects and animals, often from the sea, a possibility for rebirth in dimensions, colours and materials that differ from their original nature, and perhaps prophetically anticipating the recent creations of robotic animal husbandry, consigns these, icons of a not-too-distant future, to the collective imagination. The fruit of a timely biological study and, as always, accurate technical design and equally precise production to scale, the Orca calf, an ancient reminder of when the Dolomite mountains lay on the seabed, is an undisputed symbol of the individual and collective life force that is transformed into synergy and cooperation between individuals.

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Sieff Matthias

Sun and moon

Selva Val Gardena, Nives Square

Having completed his training at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, Matthias Sieff has developed an entirely original language in which the figure, while remaining the protagonist of a narrative fashioned on the wings of myth and fantasy, mutates, abnormally expanding its dimensions. Upright posture, powerful physical presence, sturdy and thick-set limbs, a proud gaze marked by large, wide-open and attentive eyes, Matthias Sieff´s enigmatic figures are mysterious presences that can be interpreted in a thousand different ways: clones of an archaic and primeval icon, solemn and faithful testimonies of an infinite narrative that defies the passage of time or, on the contrary, indifferent aliens, perhaps hostile to human vicissitudes. On this occasion, the artist focusses instead on two celestial bodies, the sun and the moon, defined as “luminaries” in that they illuminate the sky day and night. Two stars, powerful symbols, widely recognised in many cultures as divine figures who, by representing the concept of duality and balance between complementary opposites, define the feminine and the masculine of Nature, completing the cycle of life. The bright colours featured on the statues, carefully chosen by the artist in vibrant hues, are a stark reminder of the great Ladin and Fassa tradition to which the artist proudly belongs.

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